Response #1 to arguments against affirmative action

Image credit: NPR vis Wordle

Last year presented a hypothetical scenario in which a university incentivized an astronomy department to diversify their faculty. I wrote

A top-25 astronomy department has a major gender imbalance on their faculty. Let's say the fraction of women professors is below 10% of the overall faculty (This is a safe example since we don't actually know of such a department, do we? Right? Anyone?). 

Let's suppose that the upper administrators at said hypothetical university (e.g. the Dean of Sciences) would like to address this problem with a radical approach. If the astronomy department conducts a programmatic search for a woman junior professor and identifies a candidate that meets the high bar expected of the university and department, then a special faculty line will be made available that won't count against future departmental hires.

I then solicited arguments against such an effort. I had several motivations in soliciting these arguments. First, I really want to get the lay of the land. I've heard scattered bits and pieces of arguments against affirmative action policies (e.g. "They're unfair to white men!" or "Women are getting jobs unfairly."), and I like to be prepared when discussing them. The comments I received motivated me to read up on the subject, and talk to more knowledgeable friends and experts. I also wanted to spark a community discussion on the topic, which based on the comments to my first post, on Facebook and in emails sent to me, I think I succeeded, at least amongst the people paying any sort of attention to the issue.

(Note that Joan Schmelz wrote an excellent, related piece on affirmative action yesterday). 

Affirmative Action

Participants of the Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Penn State

I recently had the privilege of being an invited speaker at the Northeast Conference for Undergraduate Women in Physics at Penn State on January 17-19. It was a three-day regional conference for undergraduates interested in physics and one of eight regional physics conferences organized by the American Physical Society. I spoke on gender issues: unconscious bias, stereotype threat, and impostor syndrome. It was a fantastic experience. The young women I met were smart, articulate, and confident. They listened attentively, laughed when appropriate, and asked insightful questions. In fact, the question time went way over and spilled well into the slot scheduled for lunch. I came away with the feeling that, if these women were any indication, then the future of physics was in good hands.

Please don't try to play the "socioeconomic class" trump card

Today's guest blogger is Caitlin Casey, a McCue Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Irvine who studies galaxy formation and evolution, including discovering and characterizing diverse types of starburst galaxies and how they relate to more "normal" spiral galaxies in the early Universe. Caitlin recently cowrote, along with Kartik Sheth, a NatureJobs article entitled The Ethical Gray Zone, based on an extensive community poll on ethics and diversity. She is also involved in STEM outreach and mentoring within her department and throughout astronomy.  

I recently found myself in a heated internet debate on the concept of white, male privilege and whether or not affirmative action was necessary. The person I was arguing with -- who happen to be a white male, let's call him "Joe" -- was explaining to me that he hates the term "privilege" since everyone has privileges of different types and it's next to impossible to correct for those privileges fairly in job hires. Joe then gave me an example: "Obama's daughters have every privilege in the world next to my white, male cousins who will probably never live above the poverty line, but guess who'd lose when affirmative action comes into play?"

He had a point, but it wasn't one I was completely comfortable with. Joe was right that socioeconomic class can have a huge impact on our educational goals and career successes. Anyone living below the poverty line suffers from enormous lack of opportunity. If you have ever, for a moment, thought that poor people have a lack of motivation or intelligence, I strongly recommend you go out and read Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's a baffling and poignant account of what it takes to get by in America on next to nothing.

But socioeconomic class isn't the only great segregator of society, and those of us who fight daily for equity in the workplace on gender, or racial grounds can sometimes be at a loss for words when someone tries to play the "class segregation" trump card. This is what happened in my rapid-fire internet exchange with Joe. He was arguing that class inequity was a perfect counterexample for affirmative action. Joe actually laid out his argument pretty clearly: "Because there's so much poverty out there, why do we bother fussing over gender and minority ratios in the Ivory Tower? Everyone who's there is smart and deserves their spot. Let's not muddy the water with unfair comparisons and labeling some as privileged and others disadvantaged when they're all in the top 5%."