I indirectly realized what DEI was, realized a fundamental aspect of lefty thought, and that apparently I’m not a lefty.
The story starts with Gender Neutrality. A little while ago, the Trump Administration made military testing Gender Neutral and I watched as there was tons of opposition by the lemmy lefties. So, over the last few days, I dug more in to it and, sure enough, the vast majority of lemmy lefties are viciously against Gender Neutrality. Highly for gender Equality; but highly against gender Neutrality.
I came up with various iffy reasonings, like that Gender Neutrality is a removing of gender instead of respecting chosen genders; but meh. The interesting thing is what I noticed under the surface. The main reasoning for hate against the gender neutral military tests is that it was assumed they would be passed by a larger amount of males than females. This is where I started to realize DEI. The lefty approach is to manipulate the tests so women have easier tests and males have harder tests; thus resulting in a genderbalanced military.
So, in a job, same approach. If not ‘enough’ minorities are in a job, manipulate the variables so that there are more.
So what is this? The lefty way to create equality? Unbalance the playing field just right so there are equal amounts of different types of people? The cost of Equality, gained in this way, is removal of Neutrality (sexual and ethnic).
Anyway, this was a fascinating realization; and I had kept hearing about DEI and suddenly deeply understand it along with the fight against it. So what is the best approach?
My initial thought is that periods of DEI alternating with periods of not DEI seems best unless the culture is high in appreciation of diversity with a norm of naturally bringing in diverse types of people. The reason for alternating times of DEI and not DEI is so that the norm of diversity can be created through DEI, and then, through a period of notDEI, evolution can occur naturally without artificial forces. It’s like training wheels. Without change, some people are blocked from where they want to be. So DEI it up to allow them to be where was previously blocked to them. But remove DEI every once in a while and see if that “norm of naturally bringing in diverse types of people” has arisen yet. If it has, the training wheels are no longer needed; because the goal is not to forever force people to ‘do the right thing’, but to have a culture where the norm is to naturally do it themselves.
Anyway, I naturally prefer Neutrality, which I realize now blocks the lefty ability to create Equality. Really is fascinating. Thoughts?
Do you not see the glaring glowing neon flaw in that logic? If we had designed the entire construction system around women and their particular physical advantages, and 90% of construction workers were women, then accommodating men would mean reducing the efficiency for the vast majority of construction workers. You’re justifying inequality by citing inequality.
And obviously there are some advantages to being able to carry a larger load in one go. But people aren’t hauling sacks of concrete around all day with their bare hands. If you need to lift more than a few bags, you use tools like wheelbarrows and lifting cranes. The male advantage here is only in the loading step. And that assumes that men and women will load the same number of bags at the same rate. Women tend to be better at persistence tasks like long duration walking. It’s possible that while men can lift more cement in a single lift, they’ll tire more quickly than the women lifting the smaller bags.
But that is just one example. Women have advantages in finesse and dexterity that men lack. They have smaller hands that can fit in tighter spaces. If we designed engines around the bodies of women, they would be completely unmaintainable by most men. Engine mechanics would be 90% female. And when the men complained, the women mechanics would just scoff and say, “it’s impractical to design engines around both male and female hands. If your giant gorilla hands can’t do the job, then you have no business working on an engine.”
There are many tasks involved in construction. For some of them, we could save money by optimizing them for women. For others, we could save money by optimizing them for men. Currently however, they’re all optimized only around men.
The goal instead is universal design. You design things so that people regardless of body size can do the jobs. This is how most heavy construction equipment is actually designed. Instead of sizing pedals, seat heights, etc for the average male body, they make things adjustable. Does this cost additional money? Yes. But it also drastically increases the pool of potential machine operators.
And that is what’s really lost by optimizing things for one demographic group at the expense of others. You drastically decrease your pool of potential employees. From simple supply and demand, this inflates your labor costs. Someone who could be one of the most conscientious, intelligent, and productive workers never gets a chance to demonstrate their skills simply because they can’t lift a bag of cement that was sized for a male body.
Is see the point you’re trying to make, but it also ignores the reality that many, dare i say the vast majority, of women are less inclined to those physically demanding jobs that are “typically” male such as most blue collar work. The reason they don’t do that work as much isn’t just cultural, or patriarchal societal expectations.
Most of them don’t want to, so the whole thought experiment of reversing the roles is a bit moot, even ignoring the obvious stupidity a society would display by deliberately using the physically weaker, reproductive bottleneck for the more demanding and dangerous tasks a civilization needs done.
This is of course ignoring the fact that we aren’t just rational little colony ants doing only the thing we were biologically designed to do, and instead have free will and wishes and desires that don’t match the rational patterns, such as women working “male” jobs.
Ultimately the only real solution in my opinion is making exoskeletons for all laborious jobs, then any man, woman and child can lift a truck on their own.
A large, large, factor in not wanting these jobs is also why these jobs are taken over by cheaper migrant labor. Sure a someone could get up on roof, with a nail gun, and do roofing all day. For the same money, and likely better benefits though, they could get an office job. The office job doesn’t wear their bodies out by middle age, and they can work from home, or stay in a climate controlled building all day. So, over all, office job wins out. Now the construction yard has to seek out people with fewer possible opportunities to get laborers.
Then you also factor in more cultural stuff, like the fact that women report significantly higher rates sexual harassment, and other forms of mistreatment, in construction work, why would women want to be on the construction yard? The population at large is far less willing if they don’t feel like they have to, and they also get treated worse than other work sites?