I think I have a problem with diversity

For those that were able to get past the title without discarding me as a bigot (which, ironically they would be if they did), here’s what I think.

Maybe, and I say MAYBE, we got this thing wrong.

We looked back at our past and we saw discrimination, some of it was fueled by misconceptions (true, honest, ignorance), some other by the will of taking advantage on a particular group of people, and then used ignorance to sell the concept around.

Some is still here, arguably less than in the past, but still troubling us, now that we became more sensitive to it.

Why a male should be preferred to a female for any work (eventually in a leadership role) position? Why a white should be preferred to a black? Etc.

In our modern era we think this is not acceptable, and I may be with you on this one, but maybe the solutions that we envision are worse than the problem.

When I was fourteen, I used to walk around my city wearing a white t-shirt on which there was written “Stop Apartheid”, I rejoiced when Nelson Mandela was elected president few years later.

Even as a child it was clear to me that apartheid made no sense, I wrote this in a short letter to Mandela, thanking him for what he did, few months before he died.

I had a reply to that letter, coming from an assistant, thanking for the letter, as Mandela still loved to have a few letters read to him from time to time while he was in the hospital.

And this is exactly why the “Diversity” concept deeply saddens me : you “Diversity” champions are calling for more apartheid.

Did Nelson Mandela stress for diversity when he was president? He most definitely did not, he rooted for equality.

Saying that a workforce should be “diverse” means that you see human A being different from human B. But where does this stop?

Gender, color of the skin, build, religious beliefs, sexual preferences, hair color, musical preferences, age…

I can easily say that in a general context, I don’t differentiate between tall and short people, to me they are both humans. If we are going to play basketball I might, for obvious reasons.

Do you really need to classify people in some kind of category? Can’t you see THAT IS the problem in a nutshell? The problem is NOT what you do with those categories, it is with the fact that you build them in the first place!

There are attempts to pass laws to ensure a given quota of women in the parliament, because typically they are under-represented.

I don’t see gender being something that gives an advantage or disadvantage when it comes to democratically represent the people.

Forcing a 50% quota by gender (should we also do it for ages? Religious beliefs? Buid? Where do we stop?!) makes no sense to me.

I want 100% of the elected being the best candidates possible, if 100% of them are females or males, and that would be extremely unlikely to be the case, so be it.

In democracies nowadays males and females have the same right to vote, if one gender is badly represented in a way that might eventually suffer, has the power to change things at the next election round.

Private companies just care about profit, so they try to fill the positions in a way that allows them to maximize it.

If a company is so biased to chose only males for its key positions, discarding better female candidates, it will be punished by the market and eventually will fail. Companies employ humans to fill specific roles, they do not employ males or females.

Finally diversity exists because we see it and in some cases it makes practical sense (i.e. in sports etc) and yes, we still have misconcept-based discrimination, but the way we fix it is not by raising awareness on the differences, not by creating categories of people.

Maybe the path to equality is through education: If you know that category A is just as good as category B for a given task, then they automatically merge in the same category for that specific purpose.