Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -
1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.
2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.
3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.
There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.
#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.
#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?
#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.
You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.
The rest is fluff.
No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.
Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.
You pretence at being socially "woke" is laid bare as pure bluff by your refusal to accept that corrective action is needed, not just in politics, but also across the work place to ensure that positions of responsibility are more reflective of the world at large. That you are prepared to voice such vociferous opposition to this demonstrates you are just another right wing reactionary and not "woke" in any way shape or form.
I disagree with PT on this but his objection is little to do with him being woke or not. It is, imo at least, from an extreme extrapolation of certain principles that lead logically to his positions, but ignoring the real world (in this case humans have conscious and sub conscious biases that drive decisions at least as much as rationality) when it does not fit neatly into the rational world. It is the key failing with economics generally, a failure to understand how humans actually think and operate.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -
1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.
2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.
3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.
There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.
#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.
#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?
#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.
You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.
The rest is fluff.
No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.
Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.
You are not allowed to not accept it because I'm guessing that for years and years not only have candidates been equal but, whisper it, minority candidates have been better but have been passed over because they have been minorities. There has been discrimination for years and years and the better candidate has time and again been looked over in favour of someone not from a minority background.
And now you are on your high horse bleating about how everyone should be treated equally.
I've always been in favour of treating everyone equally. Failing to do so is bad for minorities.
The Party of All Women Shortlists and discrimination has never had a female leader. The Party of treating everyone as an individual not a group has had two, and has the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever.
You may be in favour of treating everyone equally and you've probably got a live chance of winning Miss World with such an attitude.
But the facts are that for decades there has been discrimination against minorities so it's a bit rich (me being polite) for you to be the champion of fair selection processes now.
And as for your other point - what is it exactly? The party of All Women Shortlists has more female MPs than The Party of Treating Everyone as an Individual 52% vs 24%. You're a numbers guy - are you saying that it is likely that in three quarters of selection processes the men were better than the women for the Conservatives?
Quite possibly, yes. Politics is a male-dominated sphere of interest, you only have to look at how few women are in this conversation on this website to see that.
Simply getting more women in to sit on the backbenches, while still promoting the men anyway, isn't a solution.
And what does that tell you? That institutionally politics needs to change so that women for whatever reason are not put off.
Why is it a "male-dominated sphere of interest"? Genetics? Chromosomes? You are so biased you are actually trying to justify the bias as though it is a natural phenomenon.
What is it about politics or barristers or baristas that is particularly "male" or "female".
Oh but of course you are a champion of equality.
Absolutely don't put off women. If there's something that can be done to attract more women then great.
Maybe for starters look at the way MPs are treated by the press and social media, especially women. Maybe look at the way prospective parliamentary candidates are treated.
Simply saying "men need not apply" doesn't fix any of those issues isn't the solution though.
It is one tool in the toolbox. And yes it might well fix some of those issues. If the HoC, say, was 50:50 then by definition politics would be a lot less "male dominated" than it currently is, which you, in a tremendous circular argument, cited as justification or explanation of why more women don't apply.
It might need a nudge to get us to where I'm sure you want us to be.
Lizzie the Lizard has had 14 PMs now. There would be a pleasing symmetry if her 15th and final PM was the son of Punjabi immigrants, seeing as she was the last Empress of India.
Next Labour leader is a bit of a side show to this I expect.
She was never Empress, or even Queen, of India, the country became a republic in 1950
Ah yes. I did fact check that before posting but got the wrong Queen Elizabeth. It was her mother.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting
Copy/paste from a previous thread:
I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.
Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm." Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!" Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"
Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.
The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them. The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.
It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).
While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.
What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.
I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.
If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate. Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).
Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?
We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.
Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.
Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean. If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.
This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).
Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.
I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.
It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.
What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.
We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.
No, you missed the whole point, sorry. The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time. To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).
The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble. It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -
1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.
2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.
3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.
There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.
#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.
#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?
#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.
You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.
The rest is fluff.
No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.
Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.
You are not allowed to not accept it because I'm guessing that for years and years not only have candidates been equal but, whisper it, minority candidates have been better but have been passed over because they have been minorities. There has been discrimination for years and years and the better candidate has time and again been looked over in favour of someone not from a minority background.
And now you are on your high horse bleating about how everyone should be treated equally.
I've always been in favour of treating everyone equally. Failing to do so is bad for minorities.
The Party of All Women Shortlists and discrimination has never had a female leader. The Party of treating everyone as an individual not a group has had two, and has the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever.
You may be in favour of treating everyone equally and you've probably got a live chance of winning Miss World with such an attitude.
But the facts are that for decades there has been discrimination against minorities so it's a bit rich (me being polite) for you to be the champion of fair selection processes now.
And as for your other point - what is it exactly? The party of All Women Shortlists has more female MPs than The Party of Treating Everyone as an Individual 52% vs 24%. You're a numbers guy - are you saying that it is likely that in three quarters of selection processes the men were better than the women for the Conservatives?
Quite possibly, yes. Politics is a male-dominated sphere of interest, you only have to look at how few women are in this conversation on this website to see that.
Simply getting more women in to sit on the backbenches, while still promoting the men anyway, isn't a solution.
And what does that tell you? That institutionally politics needs to change so that women for whatever reason are not put off.
Why is it a "male-dominated sphere of interest"? Genetics? Chromosomes? You are so biased you are actually trying to justify the bias as though it is a natural phenomenon.
What is it about politics or barristers or baristas that is particularly "male" or "female".
Oh but of course you are a champion of equality.
Absolutely don't put off women. If there's something that can be done to attract more women then great.
Maybe for starters look at the way MPs are treated by the press and social media, especially women. Maybe look at the way prospective parliamentary candidates are treated.
Simply saying "men need not apply" doesn't fix any of those issues isn't the solution though.
It is one tool in the toolbox. And yes it might well fix some of those issues. If the HoC, say, was 50:50 then by definition politics would be a lot less "male dominated" than it currently is, which you, in a tremendous circular argument, cited as justification or explanation of why more women don't apply.
It might need a nudge to get us to where I'm sure you want us to be.
I didn't cite the make up of the HoC as the reason why politics is male-dominated though, did I?
The HoC is actually a lot more "representative" of society, for both parties not just one, than sites like this tend to be.
If you want to know how to deal with issues affecting women, I'd suggest that you stop shouting and listen to some actual women. @Cyclefree on this site for instance, or Truss or many others, can be very eloquent on the issues. And women having to compete against men on a shortlist isn't something I've heard any of them name as their issues.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
You are drawing the line once the discrimination has happened. You are saying the minorities have suffered but now we must treat everyone fairly.
You are ignoring history and proceeding from the premise of inequality, thus baking it in for the future.
I can only remember one politician who resigned because they admitted they weren't up to the job. From memory it was a Labour spokeswoman in the 2000s. Virtually all try to brazen it out in the hope that things will get better.
In most jobs, incompetence is absolute, whereas in politics it is merely relative.
Do you know anyone who has resigned because they thought they weren't up to the job outside of politics? I would suggest it is pretty rare in all walks of life.
Alan Johnson resigning as shadow chancellor perhaps also partly because he didn't feel he could do a great job?
The clever men know the thing to do is to move on before you get found out.
I knew Alan personally; he did retain a remarkable humility despite his career taking off so dramatically. I can make a credible case for being personally responsible for his entering parliament in the first place, but it would be too much typing.
Alan Johnson always struck me as a very decent man, although I agreed with him on surprisingly little for a Labour politician.
To be honest, an all woman shortlist might be the only way Labour elects a female leader. And even then I'm not convinced that they wouldn't mess it up!
Would physically-male-candidates-who-self-identify-as-women* be allowed to stand
* genuine question - am so confused by the right words now… there must be a snappier way of describing someone like that?
Transwomen.
Sorry to hear about the confusion over words. I'm sure it's nothing. Did you get your 8 hours last night?
Dead wrong, it is trans women. Your error reveals a whole world of unconscious wrong think, as if you thought these people were something other than women.
Both ways are common and respectable, I think, and I always do it this way. But that's food for thought! I don't feel guilty of the charge but won't reject it out of hand since I'm a big believer in "whole worlds of unconscious wrong think" revealed by tics of language.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
It can be suitable in 3 specific scenarios -
1. Where there are a large number of slots being competed for by an even (and much) larger number of candidates. Key being, all or almost all of the candidates are suitable, it's a matter of whittling down to what there's capacity for. Example, a top uni wishing to increase its number of students from ethnic minority or working class or state school backgrounds.
2. Where optics are important and for valid reasons. Example, that our main progressive party of the left ends the embarrassment of never having had a woman leader. Another example, where the police responsible for serving diverse communities wish to avoid being overwhelmingly white.
3. Where a high status, high reward, influential occupation is dominated by people from a privileged social background. Example, you name it.
There are probably other scenarios too, where positive discrimination can work well, but these are what spring to mind for me.
#1 there should be a better way than discrimination to whittle down the candidates.
#2 So you want to use the candidate to cover up your own embarrassment? Not because you think they're the right person for the job? They're a tool for your own agenda?
#3 If the job is high reward and influential surely its even more important to get the right person for the job? If the right person is from a minority then great, ensure there's no barriers in their way.
You have already accepted that it is ok to positively discriminate.
The rest is fluff.
No I've not. You put forward a stupid scenario I said I didn't accept.
Since I don't accept coin toss as a solution which was your forced choice alternative, I don't accept that bollocks either.
You are not allowed to not accept it because I'm guessing that for years and years not only have candidates been equal but, whisper it, minority candidates have been better but have been passed over because they have been minorities. There has been discrimination for years and years and the better candidate has time and again been looked over in favour of someone not from a minority background.
And now you are on your high horse bleating about how everyone should be treated equally.
I've always been in favour of treating everyone equally. Failing to do so is bad for minorities.
The Party of All Women Shortlists and discrimination has never had a female leader. The Party of treating everyone as an individual not a group has had two, and has the most ethnically diverse Cabinet ever.
You may be in favour of treating everyone equally and you've probably got a live chance of winning Miss World with such an attitude.
But the facts are that for decades there has been discrimination against minorities so it's a bit rich (me being polite) for you to be the champion of fair selection processes now.
And as for your other point - what is it exactly? The party of All Women Shortlists has more female MPs than The Party of Treating Everyone as an Individual 52% vs 24%. You're a numbers guy - are you saying that it is likely that in three quarters of selection processes the men were better than the women for the Conservatives?
Quite possibly, yes. Politics is a male-dominated sphere of interest, you only have to look at how few women are in this conversation on this website to see that.
Simply getting more women in to sit on the backbenches, while still promoting the men anyway, isn't a solution.
And what does that tell you? That institutionally politics needs to change so that women for whatever reason are not put off.
Why is it a "male-dominated sphere of interest"? Genetics? Chromosomes? You are so biased you are actually trying to justify the bias as though it is a natural phenomenon.
What is it about politics or barristers or baristas that is particularly "male" or "female".
Oh but of course you are a champion of equality.
Absolutely don't put off women. If there's something that can be done to attract more women then great.
Maybe for starters look at the way MPs are treated by the press and social media, especially women. Maybe look at the way prospective parliamentary candidates are treated.
Simply saying "men need not apply" doesn't fix any of those issues isn't the solution though.
It is one tool in the toolbox. And yes it might well fix some of those issues. If the HoC, say, was 50:50 then by definition politics would be a lot less "male dominated" than it currently is, which you, in a tremendous circular argument, cited as justification or explanation of why more women don't apply.
It might need a nudge to get us to where I'm sure you want us to be.
I didn't cite the make up of the HoC as the reason why politics is male-dominated though, did I?
The HoC is actually a lot more "representative" of society, for both parties not just one, than sites like this tend to be.
If you want to know how to deal with issues affecting women, I'd suggest that you stop shouting and listen to some actual women. @Cyclefree on this site for instance, or Truss or many others, can be very eloquent on the issues. And women having to compete against men on a shortlist isn't something I've heard any of them name as their issues.
I'm not shouting. I'm trying to point out the inconsistencies in your approach.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
You are drawing the line once the discrimination has happened. You are saying the minorities have suffered but now we must treat everyone fairly.
You are ignoring history and proceeding from the premise of inequality, thus baking it in for the future.
Yes I am unabashedly drawing the line. We must treat everyone fairly.
If there's issues with inequality then that should be tackled based upon need, not based upon discrimination. I don't think Sunak's kids will need discrimination in their favour because of "baked in" discrimination, do you? But other's might do regardless of race. If support is needed give it to whoever needs it, for whatever reason they need it.
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.
I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.
A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.
I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.
That’s the issue. No one wants to be the one saying “let’s hire the white male.” In many organisations, it’s tantamount to career suicide (at least at non-senior levels - when it comes to the top posts, funnily enough they don’t care that much).
If you want to see where this leads to, look at the current crop of TV adverts. I’d say well over half feature Black actors and probably not far off two thirds. You can see what’s happening. The advertiser has told its agency “find me some black people!” so they can look socially aware. The agency has scurried off and found them. Individually, it makes sense. In totally, it means that the TV adverts are completely out of whack with the make up of the country.
A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
If a particular social group is statistically overrepresented in one profession, it follows that they will be statistically underrepresented in another.
A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting
Copy/paste from a previous thread:
I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.
Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm." Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!" Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"
Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.
The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them. The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.
It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).
While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.
What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.
I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.
If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate. Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).
Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?
We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.
Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.
Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean. If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.
This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).
Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.
I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.
It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.
What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.
We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.
No, you missed the whole point, sorry. The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time. To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).
The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble. It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).
To be honest, an all woman shortlist might be the only way Labour elects a female leader. And even then I'm not convinced that they wouldn't mess it up!
Would physically-male-candidates-who-self-identify-as-women* be allowed to stand
* genuine question - am so confused by the right words now… there must be a snappier way of describing someone like that?
What do you mean by the use of the words "physically female"? Are we talking two XX chromosones? Are we talking breasts? Do you need a cervix?
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.
I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.
Tell him that the candidate with the Von Tirpitz beard actually is a woman. Do I have to do all the thinking around here?
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
Back in the 1990s, I volunteered to help at a primary school in an inner-city area. The kids would call me “Miss” because they assumed that is how a primary teacher should be addressed. The teachers later asked if I would speak to the pupils at assembly because the children lacked male role models (don’t snigger).
Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting
Copy/paste from a previous thread:
I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.
Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm." Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!" Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"
Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.
The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them. The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.
It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).
While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.
What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.
I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.
If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate. Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).
Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?
We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.
Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.
Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean. If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.
This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).
Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.
I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.
It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.
What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.
We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.
No, you missed the whole point, sorry. The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time. To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).
The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble. It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).
In short, correlation doesn't imply causation.
Yes, sure, but you don't know what these factors are, only that they're stronger than the effect from face masks.
So they might be things we can influence that will have a greater effect than face masks - and importantly they will help people in Wales who are already being told to use face masks, so can't use that intervention to reduce their higher transmission rate.
You can't just insist that every effect that results in Wales having greater transmission than England is something we can't do anything about without evidence.
You're right, I can't, so I didn't. I don't know what all the factors are, I'm just making a very limited point about the fact that masks are effective and how just looking at overall case numbers can mislead us into thinking the opposite. I'm not even saying masks should be mandated. If you have a point about other measures being desirable or more effective, that's fine, no arguments from me.
On topic, I think Mike should also throw Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper into the ring. Rayner, because she would almost certainly bring the far-left vote with here (on the basis that the new leadership rules mean that the far-left would have no chance of getting a candidate on the ballot) and Cooper because the last poll of Labour members showed her as the favourite.
That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.
A couple of decades ago, I was walking along the beach just to the east of Hunstanton. A young seal pup was just out of the tideline, and looked (*) in distress. Instead of leaving it alone, people were letting their dogs go up, sniff, it, and bark at it. I took a photo and left.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
If a particular social group is statistically overrepresented in one profession, it follows that they will be statistically underrepresented in another.
Not necessarily. Eg, if 90% of MPs were men, all other white collar professions could still be close to 50/50.
Facemasks really doing the job in Wales then with its highest infection rate in the UK. Almost conclude they are worse than useless in a real world setting
Copy/paste from a previous thread:
I've been thinking about how to best explain why the "Wales / England, masks / maskless" comparisons don't work. It's a car analogy.
Person A: "Using winter tyres in the summer uses more petrol, so it's better to shift to summer tyres when it's warm." Person B: "Ah-ha, but I'm using winter tyres here in Norfolk and you're using summer tyres there in Braemar, and my fuel efficiency is the same as yours! Therefore it makes no difference!" Person A: "Yes, because I'm forever driving up steep hills, and you're not. It would be worse again for me if I was using winter tyres"
Obviously, this vignette also proves nothing, but try to keep it in mind when you think about bulk comparisons between two different places implementing different policies.
The claim is that masks lower infection rates compared to not using them. The claim is NOT that masks make your infection rates lower than unmasked places.
It's a subtlety that can easily be lost in a debate, but it's a vital one for any system where multiple independent variables control a dependent variable (which is say basically everything in the real world).
While that's true the argument doesn't help us to work out how useful facemasks are, and therefore whether they should be the focus of public policy.
What we can say is that one of two things must be true. Either enforcing face mask usage at this stage of the pandemic results in more transmission, or there are other differences between Wales and England that have more of an effect on transmission than face mask usage.
I would suggest that public policy would be better directed towards those other differences, working out what they are and making the most of them to reduce transmission.
If those other differences are, for example, crowded housing then the prospects for meaningful change in the short term are nil. You decide first if you want to apply policy pressure on a perceived problem, then you decide what measures are available in the timescale. Lower density housing is probably desirable but a decades-long goal. If you want something on the days-scale, masks are part of the debate. Mask adherence lowers transmission (to about half?? check that, I might be misremembering).
Yes. The differences between Wales and England might be structural differences that we can't do anything about in the short term, or they might not be. How could we work out whether they are structural and essentially fixed?
We could look at the differences between England and Wales over time. If there were structural, fixed, differences then we would expect to see consistently higher transmission in Wales than in England. My impression is that the contrary is the case.
Consequently your argument that the other differences, which produce a higher transmission rate in Wales are fixed is rejected.
Input variables interact: structural issues may only manifest under certain social or environmental conditions. I'll give a toy example which is oversimplified, but illustrates what I mean. If you have a large commuting population, say Aberdare residents commuting to Cardiff offices. Suppose opening train windows reduces transmission dramatically. During periods of weather when having train windows open is comfortable or even desirable, you're knocking out a commuting pillar of the transmission. When the weather gets colder, the passengers close the windows and boom, transmissions spike.
This effect wouldn't show up at all if your work/residence/travel arrangements were different (e.g. where I live there are no trains at all, in other parts of the country commuting by bike is easier - I don't recommend cycling from Cardiff to Aberdare).
Structural factors are not always active. And if you think about it, this is the point of masks. They interrupt the transmission that comes from people crowding into the same bus/train/shop/pub etc. If everyone wfh and had everything delivered and didn't mix in any way, masks would be pretty pointless. That structure of society isn't realistic or desirable, so masks have a realistic role if we want to take advantage of them.
I'd suggest that improving ventilation is one of those things that isn't structural that we might want to concentrate public policy onto rather than face masks.
It also seems unlikely that there will be significantly stronger effects from inadequate ventilation or commuting in Wales than in England.
What this discussion tells me is that we do not know why there is higher transmission in Wales, and I think we ought to find that out before mandating face masks that we know are not the most important factor at play.
We're no longer in the emergency phase of the pandemic where we simply have to do anything and everything in the hope that something works. We've had nearly two years to gather and analyse evidence and we have the advantage from vaccines, so we can act more slowly on the basis of good evidence.
No, you missed the whole point, sorry. The issue in my example (and please remember it's a toy example not a serious attempt at explaining the transmission differences) isn't ventilation per se. It's the fact that structural effects may be masked (har har) by environmental ones part of the time. To put it another way, the way that Welsh people live may, in bulk, be different to the way people in England live. And the way those differences respond to environmental changes (e.g. weather) will cause spikes and troughs at different times, even if the weather in England and Wales is identical (which, again, it isn't).
The headline is that there are MANY independent variables and ONE dependent variable. Trying to explain the dependent variable with reference to a SINGLE independent variable leads to trouble. It's like trying to explain that being poorly educated makes you a Conservative voter. Well, there might be an education factor in there, but the correlation is confounded by a hugely overbearing age factor, along with the fact that many more people go to university these days. It's age driving it. And there's even a chance that age is masking the fact that higher education makes you MORE Conservative (I'm not saying it does, but it's possible).
To be honest, an all woman shortlist might be the only way Labour elects a female leader. And even then I'm not convinced that they wouldn't mess it up!
Would physically-male-candidates-who-self-identify-as-women* be allowed to stand
* genuine question - am so confused by the right words now… there must be a snappier way of describing someone like that?
What do you mean by the use of the words "physically female"? Are we talking two XX chromosones? Are we talking breasts? Do you need a cervix?
Maybe do what people at Oxford used to do when they wanted to get in, namely do an obscure course and then change to what they wanted once they were in. So you could self-identify as a woman for the interview stage and then, once in, change self-identity back (and, if your job was threatened, change it back again).
On topic, I think Mike should also throw Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper into the ring. Rayner, because she would almost certainly bring the far-left vote with here (on the basis that the new leadership rules mean that the far-left would have no chance of getting a candidate on the ballot) and Cooper because the last poll of Labour members showed her as the favourite.
That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.
Isn’t there a chance Phillipson loses her seat? Not sure how it looks under the new boundaries so maybe that’s not the case.
On topic, I think Mike should also throw Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper into the ring. Rayner, because she would almost certainly bring the far-left vote with here (on the basis that the new leadership rules mean that the far-left would have no chance of getting a candidate on the ballot) and Cooper because the last poll of Labour members showed her as the favourite.
That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.
Isn’t there a chance Phillipson loses her seat? Not sure how it looks under the new boundaries so maybe that’s not the case.
To be honest, an all woman shortlist might be the only way Labour elects a female leader. And even then I'm not convinced that they wouldn't mess it up!
Would physically-male-candidates-who-self-identify-as-women* be allowed to stand
* genuine question - am so confused by the right words now… there must be a snappier way of describing someone like that?
What do you mean by the use of the words "physically female"? Are we talking two XX chromosones? Are we talking breasts? Do you need a cervix?
Has it been to bed with Leon? is pretty conclusive.
Mr. F, aye, and I don't generally mind that (not many earnest feminists yearning to break the glass ceiling and work in sewage treatment plants). But for schools, when so many kids lack father figures, it's a rare exception.
Mr. F, aye, and I don't generally mind that (not many earnest feminists yearning to break the glass ceiling and work in sewage treatment plants). But for schools, when so many kids lack father figures, it's a rare exception.
It would be desirable for there to be more male teachers, but trying to create parity between men and women would obviously exclude a lot of well-qualified women.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
Edit x2: I see you say officer class. Yes that would be lower 50% RMAS is privately educated. But that is not 80-100% so it's on the move.
On topic, I think Mike should also throw Angela Rayner and Yvette Cooper into the ring. Rayner, because she would almost certainly bring the far-left vote with here (on the basis that the new leadership rules mean that the far-left would have no chance of getting a candidate on the ballot) and Cooper because the last poll of Labour members showed her as the favourite.
That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.
Isn’t there a chance Phillipson loses her seat? Not sure how it looks under the new boundaries so maybe that’s not the case.
Houghton and Sunderland South is being split three ways:
I can only remember one politician who resigned because they admitted they weren't up to the job. From memory it was a Labour spokeswoman in the 2000s. Virtually all try to brazen it out in the hope that things will get better.
Not just a spokeswoman: she was the Secretary of State for Education (or whatever the department was called at the time).
Estelle Morris?
Yes. I always had an awful lot of respect for her over that.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?
Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.
Mr. F, aye. Wouldn't call for some artificial quota, but getting just a few more so kids with no father at home and no father figure elsewhere can have someone providing a positive male role model.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
You are drawing the line once the discrimination has happened. You are saying the minorities have suffered but now we must treat everyone fairly.
You are ignoring history and proceeding from the premise of inequality, thus baking it in for the future.
Yes I am unabashedly drawing the line. We must treat everyone fairly.
If there's issues with inequality then that should be tackled based upon need, not based upon discrimination. I don't think Sunak's kids will need discrimination in their favour because of "baked in" discrimination, do you? But other's might do regardless of race. If support is needed give it to whoever needs it, for whatever reason they need it.
Jeez louise. So Sunak the billionaire's kids don't need any help so every child of African asian immigrants doesn't need any help.
What fucking world do you live in?
Do you think that there was for example any discrimination against Ugandan Asians when they arrived? Do you think any of them might have suffered and not got the jobs they applied for because they were Ugandan Asians?
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?
Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?
Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.
Yes we both saw that BBC article which I edited my post to reflect.
It is what it is. If they had said no more people from my social group then first I wouldn't have known and secondly the army would have come to represent far more closely society at large earlier. I can't see how that is a bad thing but neither can I go back in time to assess my reaction.
I could see that. Non-identical obviously, but sibling level.
Good to see the thread kicked off with such incisive political analysis
What of it? IshmaelZ made an offhand comment, which was responded to. I dare say restriction to political analysis, incisive or otherwise, would rather alter the general casual atmosphere.
Mr. kinabalu, apologies, I missed your reply before.
I'm not in favour of limiting recruitment by sex. Because of the particular nature of primary school teachers (often providing parental figures for those either lacking one or both parents or as a better version if said parents are rather bad examples) and the heavily slanted sex composition of schoolteachers I would like to see a recruitment drive for male teachers to increase the numbers. I would not advocate either all-male shortlists or some sort of quota, however.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
I think the default expectation is that it should do, because that's what would happen in the absence of any cultural biases.
If there are cultural biases then they're likely preventing people who would be good at something from doing that thing, and we therefore have inefficient allocation of people to professions on a grand scale.
So it would be better for everyone if such biases were removed or corrected for.
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Just as a question, which categories would you say change needs to happen?
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
We have had a role open half a year. Quite niche, difficult to find candidates. Interviewed two today that interviewed really well and both suitably qualified. But the hiring manager says with a sigh, “a shame as it will be hard to get either signed off as they are both white males”.
I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.
That’s the issue. No one wants to be the one saying “let’s hire the white male.” In many organisations, it’s tantamount to career suicide (at least at non-senior levels - when it comes to the top posts, funnily enough they don’t care that much).
If you want to see where this leads to, look at the current crop of TV adverts. I’d say well over half feature Black actors and probably not far off two thirds. You can see what’s happening. The advertiser has told its agency “find me some black people!” so they can look socially aware. The agency has scurried off and found them. Individually, it makes sense. In totally, it means that the TV adverts are completely out of whack with the make up of the country.
Is that a source of huge concern to you?
As I have related previously, I am among those PB-ers who has done a stint at McDonalds for a holiday job. When I first started I had been working there for a couple of weeks (in Wembley) before I realised that I was the only white guy there. I remain untraumatised.
Ang would eat those 3 alive. Ang is tough, she has come from nowhere to the top of the party. Nandy completely missed her opening in the last leadership campaign, Reeves was awful in the Miliband years, a real drag and the Sunderland girl hasn't got the background story of Angela Rayner. Ang is still the no1 contender and crucially no Social Democrat.
I don't disagree about what she said about Bunter and his pals either.
Excellent. Keep at it for goodness sake.
= Lab out of power for the foreseeable future.
Talk like that and you'll send me back voting for the Cons.
Labour isn't going to win being Social Democrats, unless the economy totally tanks and even then Bunter might lie his way through.
Labour need a leader in touch with the working person. Ideally with some background in small business, where they could really make hay.
As we are now nobody comes to mind. Rayner is probably the best of a bad bunch.
She is a walking disaster area. She would be a bigger turn off to the floating voter than Jeremy Corbyn
Surely it depends on whether the floating voter in question likes redheaded women.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
When they are making laws for society at large, frankly or even serving them coffee, then I think they absolutely should do.
You were an army officer. Should the army operate on the basis that 51% of its officer class must be be female, 15% from ethnic minorities, 93% from State schools etc.?
I struggle to see how the army would be worse if so. The entry requirements are the entry requirements.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
And had you been turned down, because your particular social group had reached its quota for that year, would you consider that fair?
Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.
Yes we both saw that BBC article which I edited my post to reflect.
It is what it is. If they had said no more people from my social group then first I wouldn't have known and secondly the army would have come to represent far more closely society at large earlier. I can't see how that is a bad thing but neither can I go back in time to assess my reaction.
IMHO, it would be unfair for you to be prevented from pursuing a profession to which you were well-suited because you were deemed to come from a group which was, in aggregate, more privileged than the average. That takes into account neither your abilities, nor your individual circumstances.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
That's not really the goal though. The aspiration (not goal, since it's not perfectly achievable) is equal opportunities and if high status professions are dominated by people from privileged backgrounds this is telling us we are a long way off it. Positive discrimination is then just something that can work in certain circumstances to make some progress in this area.
Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
I think the default expectation is that it should do, because that's what would happen in the absence of any cultural biases.
If there are cultural biases then they're likely preventing people who would be good at something from doing that thing, and we therefore have inefficient allocation of people to professions on a grand scale.
So it would be better for everyone if such biases were removed or corrected for.
The biggest determinant is whether or not you come from a well to do background. Some people would favour radical redistribution of wealth to correct for this, but there is no appetite for this among the voters.
Why should one expect every profession to reflect the make up of society at large?
I think the default expectation is that it should do, because that's what would happen in the absence of any cultural biases.
If there are cultural biases then they're likely preventing people who would be good at something from doing that thing, and we therefore have inefficient allocation of people to professions on a grand scale.
So it would be better for everyone if such biases were removed or corrected for.
Why?
People don't always want to do what the stereotypers say.
That's exactly the same issue as the current Gender Pay Gap stats.
Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.
The fascinating thing is how peer pressure works into this.
My daughters loved technical Lego, until they were old enough to succumb to the peer group pressure to like Lego Friends.
In my job (IT) it is common for women to relate experiences of the... suggestions from other women to go for non-IT careers. Being a geek is not seen as "womanly" by many other women - though, interestingly, doctor now is. As is lawyer....
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
Back in the 1990s, I volunteered to help at a primary school in an inner-city area. The kids would call me “Miss” because they assumed that is how a primary teacher should be addressed. The teachers later asked if I would speak to the pupils at assembly because the children lacked male role models (don’t snigger).
I’ve occasionally been called Miss by Y7s in their first term (and once “mum”!)
Will the Labour membership vote for a woman? Every single woman who has stood for a membership vote for leader, has been beaten by every man in the contest.
Finally an admission from the right that status quo/traditional selection processes dont automatically pick the best person for the job. Hope that will be remembered for the next positive discrimination discussions, the Labour Party is a great example to use.
If the prior processes are not picking the right person for the job then the solution is to tackle the discrimination so that going forwards the best person is chosen.
"Positive discrimination" is still discrimination, it doesn't do that.
Yes of course, if you could magically get rid of all the discriminatory biases and processes in the real world that would be fantastic. Also magical, it ain't gonna happen. Human brains are built on using bias and pattern recognition very heavily, more than we use rationality.
No need for magic, just tackling the real issues.
"Positive discrimination" is no better at finding the right person for the job, if you're still discriminating against the people you were discriminating against then the 'right person' still suffers because they're being discriminated against. Promoting someone else from the same group because "they all look the same" to you isn't a fix.
What if the organisation has never had a minority C-level executive. And it interviews two candidates for one such role and they are exactly equal and one is from the minority whose inequality you want to address and one is from the prevailing majority.
Mermaids gets everywhere, doesn't it?
On @TOPPING’s question, there is a few problems that can arise from his scenario:
1. The losing candidate says “they only got it because they were x” causing resentment towards x
Damn didn’t finish
2. If you have a positive discrimination policy, there is always the question of “did they only get the job because they were x?”.
I’m Topping’s scenario, it would be much better just to toss a coin.
Not at all. Change needs to happen. Once in the job people can prove themselves. And no one has given a tuppenny fuck historically if someone in the job who is not a minority only got the job on that basis.
Actually a lot of us have given a fuck historically about that and that's why we oppose such discrimination.
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
You are drawing the line once the discrimination has happened. You are saying the minorities have suffered but now we must treat everyone fairly.
You are ignoring history and proceeding from the premise of inequality, thus baking it in for the future.
Yes I am unabashedly drawing the line. We must treat everyone fairly.
If there's issues with inequality then that should be tackled based upon need, not based upon discrimination. I don't think Sunak's kids will need discrimination in their favour because of "baked in" discrimination, do you? But other's might do regardless of race. If support is needed give it to whoever needs it, for whatever reason they need it.
Jeez louise. So Sunak the billionaire's kids don't need any help so every child of African asian immigrants doesn't need any help.
What fucking world do you live in?
Do you think that there was for example any discrimination against Ugandan Asians when they arrived? Do you think any of them might have suffered and not got the jobs they applied for because they were Ugandan Asians?
So do I.
But now you want everyone treated the same.
How do you go from "If support is needed give it to whoever needs it, for whatever reason they need it." to "every child of African asian immigrants doesn't need any help"?
Are you being deliberately disingenuous?
If support is needed, give it to whoever needs it. Based on their own individual needs, not based on the colour of their skin.
If a child of Ugandan ethnic origin needs support they should get it. Similarly a child who has been orphaned, or a child in the foster system, or a child of poor white parents, or a child of . . . any such children that need help our education system and support systems should be designed to reach them all as best as possible.
Mr. kinabalu, apologies, I missed your reply before.
I'm not in favour of limiting recruitment by sex. Because of the particular nature of primary school teachers (often providing parental figures for those either lacking one or both parents or as a better version if said parents are rather bad examples) and the heavily slanted sex composition of schoolteachers I would like to see a recruitment drive for male teachers to increase the numbers. I would not advocate either all-male shortlists or some sort of quota, however.
There have been several efforts to recruit more males into primary school teaching, particularly in the Blair/Brown years, when the Teacher Development Agency (as it then was) ran campaigns to attract men. These had some, but not enough, success. The proportion rose between 2000 and 2010, but since then progress has stalled.
Currently, around 15% of teachers in primary schools are male. The proportion of primary school headteachers who are male is just under double that. I'll leave it to readers to explain that. Interestingly, a male can make it to the top much more quickly in primary schools than in secondary schools, but of course headteachers' salaries are much lower in primaries than secondaries.
Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.
The fascinating thing is how peer pressure works into this.
My daughters loved technical Lego, until they were old enough to succumb to the peer group pressure to like Lego Friends.
In my job (IT) it is common for women to relate experiences of the... suggestions from other women to go for non-IT careers. Being a geek is not seen as "womanly" by many other women - though, interestingly, doctor now is. As is lawyer....
So we have these hiring issues all the time, and I've always been of a @Philip_Thompson mindset - i.e. we want the best person for the job, irrespective of their physical atttributes.
My tech dev head said to me early on "I'd really like to make sure we get a female developer relatively early. The larger you get without any women on the team, the harder it is to hire women in the future."
It's a fair point: software development (being a relatively in demand job) is one where applicants regularly decline offers. And being able to get the right people is a competitive advantage. The last thing you want to do is to shrink the size of the talent pool in which you're fishing.
Comments
Simply saying "bad things happened in the past" isn't a good reason to do what you know to be bad today though either.
Either you believe sexism and racism is bad, or you don't.
It might need a nudge to get us to where I'm sure you want us to be.
Excellent yorker on the final delivery for the dot ball. A lot of pressure in those circumstances and he got it just right.
Both teams aren't the strongest but they both did themselves proud (even if the fielding was a bit lacking on both sides).
Or are you too all-man for such a profession.
And shall we laugh at the male nurses also? Phnar.
Edit: sortry, just that it feels like that - rain everywhere.
Certainly, when I worked in Banking, there were many - and probably disproportionately so - from South Asian heritages.
As for women, there were certainly no shortage. The real difference always came when women went off to have kids and, more often than not, wanted to work 4 day weeks.
Now, it’s true that weren’t that many Black candidates but even that is skewed. Again, there were a fair few Black African-descent colleagues. The gap was in Black Caribbean descent individuals, at least in the front office.
The HoC is actually a lot more "representative" of society, for both parties not just one, than sites like this tend to be.
If you want to know how to deal with issues affecting women, I'd suggest that you stop shouting and listen to some actual women. @Cyclefree on this site for instance, or Truss or many others, can be very eloquent on the issues. And women having to compete against men on a shortlist isn't something I've heard any of them name as their issues.
You are ignoring history and proceeding from the premise of inequality, thus baking it in for the future.
But I must dash now - will catch up later.
If there's issues with inequality then that should be tackled based upon need, not based upon discrimination. I don't think Sunak's kids will need discrimination in their favour because of "baked in" discrimination, do you? But other's might do regardless of race. If support is needed give it to whoever needs it, for whatever reason they need it.
Mr. Topping, you misunderstand. Children need male role models. With fewer fathers, because courts assume motherhood matters more than fatherhood, and relatively few male primary school teachers this is a severe absence and it's not good for children.
Edited extra bit: as an aside, this is an area where representation actually matters. But because it's mostly women employed as primary school teachers, that's seen as fine and dandy.
I mean what the fucking buggery is the world coming to.
I fear that this 'small dick energy' of his is overrated.
The dogs thing was particularly stupid; the news was filled with the fact that canine distemper was ripping through the seal population in that part of the world, and it was spread by... yep, you've guessed it, dogs.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2191470.stm
(*) TBF I have no idea how a seal *should* look. But I guessed it shouldn't just lie on the sand as large dogs came up to it.
Just noticed the new "Charlie" logo btw. Excellent. I must do something about this tin of beans at some point.
If you want to see where this leads to, look at the current crop of TV adverts. I’d say well over half feature Black actors and probably not far off two thirds. You can see what’s happening. The advertiser has told its agency “find me some black people!” so they can look socially aware. The agency has scurried off and found them. Individually, it makes sense. In totally, it means that the TV adverts are completely out of whack with the make up of the country.
I really do hope that they try and pet a sick badger. Or does that make me a bad person?
I don't know what all the factors are, I'm just making a very limited point about the fact that masks are effective and how just looking at overall case numbers can mislead us into thinking the opposite. I'm not even saying masks should be mandated. If you have a point about other measures being desirable or more effective, that's fine, no arguments from me.
thesword
That said, if Starmer stays on until after the next election - which is almost certain - Cooper will drop out of possible contention and Phillipson will be the big favourite. As she should be.
And I've got to believe that we are close to that for those last two (ethnic minorities and state schools, although it probably repays some googling).
Edit: 12.9% ethnic minorities in the army it seems from Google.
Edit x2: I see you say officer class. Yes that would be lower 50% RMAS is privately educated. But that is not 80-100% so it's on the move.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Seaham and Peterlee
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Durham, City of
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/fcgi-bin/calcwork23.py?seat=Washington and Sunderland South West
I suspect she'll get one of those seats.
Edit: I do note that in 2019 49% of officer cadets came from private schools, compared to 7% of the population.
What fucking world do you live in?
Do you think that there was for example any discrimination against Ugandan Asians when they arrived? Do you think any of them might have suffered and not got the jobs they applied for because they were Ugandan Asians?
So do I.
But now you want everyone treated the same.
It is what it is. If they had said no more people from my social group then first I wouldn't have known and secondly the army would have come to represent far more closely society at large earlier. I can't see how that is a bad thing but neither can I go back in time to assess my reaction.
I'm not in favour of limiting recruitment by sex. Because of the particular nature of primary school teachers (often providing parental figures for those either lacking one or both parents or as a better version if said parents are rather bad examples) and the heavily slanted sex composition of schoolteachers I would like to see a recruitment drive for male teachers to increase the numbers. I would not advocate either all-male shortlists or some sort of quota, however.
If there are cultural biases then they're likely preventing people who would be good at something from doing that thing, and we therefore have inefficient allocation of people to professions on a grand scale.
So it would be better for everyone if such biases were removed or corrected for.
As I have related previously, I am among those PB-ers who has done a stint at McDonalds for a holiday job. When I first started I had been working there for a couple of weeks (in Wembley) before I realised that I was the only white guy there. I remain untraumatised.
*looks down at grey joggy bottoms*
Men and women are into different things, to a greater or lesser extent. This is natural and normal. Evolutionarily, we're pretty much still at caveman level. Having different interests isn't proof of bias, the idea that all being equal means everyone having identical interests is just wrong.
Muffin.
SKS fans please explain
Crumpet.
People don't always want to do what the stereotypers say.
That's exactly the same issue as the current Gender Pay Gap stats.
The parroting of that bullshit is one reason I stopped bothering with the news. If I want batshit insane wittering I can find that on Twitter.
"Owen Jones
Journalist and commentator Owen Jones prompts debate after Tweeting criticism of Labour leader Keir Starmer"
Frankly, it could be any day of the year!!
My daughters loved technical Lego, until they were old enough to succumb to the peer group pressure to like Lego Friends.
In my job (IT) it is common for women to relate experiences of the... suggestions from other women to go for non-IT careers. Being a geek is not seen as "womanly" by many other women - though, interestingly, doctor now is. As is lawyer....
Darn it! TUD beat me to it!
Are you being deliberately disingenuous?
If support is needed, give it to whoever needs it. Based on their own individual needs, not based on the colour of their skin.
If a child of Ugandan ethnic origin needs support they should get it. Similarly a child who has been orphaned, or a child in the foster system, or a child of poor white parents, or a child of . . . any such children that need help our education system and support systems should be designed to reach them all as best as possible.
Currently, around 15% of teachers in primary schools are male. The proportion of primary school headteachers who are male is just under double that. I'll leave it to readers to explain that. Interestingly, a male can make it to the top much more quickly in primary schools than in secondary schools, but of course headteachers' salaries are much lower in primaries than secondaries.
My tech dev head said to me early on "I'd really like to make sure we get a female developer relatively early. The larger you get without any women on the team, the harder it is to hire women in the future."
It's a fair point: software development (being a relatively in demand job) is one where applicants regularly decline offers. And being able to get the right people is a competitive advantage. The last thing you want to do is to shrink the size of the talent pool in which you're fishing.