> Valuing people more or less depending on what chromosomes they have or how the flesh they have under their clothes is formed is wrong and dehumanizing. People should be valued by what they do and make, not by how they are born and raised.
This depends on context though, right? We all have our blind spots and our areas of unusual insight, and these are shaped partly by our life experience, which is shaped partly by our gender, race, economic background, etc. So if a group consists almost entirely of men (or women, or people who grew up rich, or whatever), it might genuinely have some avoidable blind spots and biases.
Treating women as superior or inferior to men is dumb, but caring about gender balance can make good sense.
[edit: the key point, which I didn't make explicit, is that this holds even if there was no significant bias in the hiring process that produced the imbalance. People who are great choices individually might not make the best team, if their strengths and weaknesses are correlated rather than complementary.]
First, you make the determination that people should be assessed based on objective metrics.
Second, you then try to correct (unconscious) bias with necessary metric-correcting, like gender balance.
If you put gender balance as the underlying truth, and then to optimize your process to make it work, you will see various issues that eventually sabotage your goals.
I'm happy to reconsider my views, but from this comment alone I can't really tell how or why you disagree with me. I'll read a more detailed reply if you feel like leaving one.
edit: I see you wrote elsewhere in this thread that
> I see gender balance of a mechanism for approximating selecting the best talents.
My argument is that gender balance (and other kinds of demographic balance) can be valuable independently of its use as a proxy for unbiased hiring. I'm suggesting that, even if an unbiased hiring process would produce a skewed gender balance,[1] this might not be a good outcome, because a heavily male/heavily female group might suffer from shared biases or blind spots that would be smoothed out in a more balanced group.
[1] I hope treating this as a possibility isn't too controversial; I think there are plenty of ways it could happen, regardless of the existence of any innate differences. For example, even when sexism is the problem, it might be acting mostly at an earlier stage inaccessible to the company doing the hiring (e.g. social pressures on kids to do 'masculine'/'feminine' subjects).
This depends on context though, right? We all have our blind spots and our areas of unusual insight, and these are shaped partly by our life experience, which is shaped partly by our gender, race, economic background, etc. So if a group consists almost entirely of men (or women, or people who grew up rich, or whatever), it might genuinely have some avoidable blind spots and biases.
Treating women as superior or inferior to men is dumb, but caring about gender balance can make good sense.
[edit: the key point, which I didn't make explicit, is that this holds even if there was no significant bias in the hiring process that produced the imbalance. People who are great choices individually might not make the best team, if their strengths and weaknesses are correlated rather than complementary.]