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Bravo, thank you, and this is exactly why most of us come to FR.

Again, we have about 95% agreement and the 5% isn’t worth a flame war. But I feel compelled to explain that 5%.

under-representation

“Proportional representation” is a forced human construct. It doesn’t exist in nature. Now, humans shouldn’t be ruled by the ways of the cuttlefish or cow or osprey, but it IS helpful to remember that men and women populate in professions or groups differently vs society as a whole.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The “bad” is when the natural proportion is suppressed. The problem is that the natural proportion is unknown to man; only God knows it.

Thus, using your example, women make up about 35% of all STEM practitioners vs 51% of the US. However, 51% isn’t necessarily the natural proportion of women in STEM. We don’t KNOW what is that/God’s proportion, but it’s wrong to presume it’s 51%. Indeed, I would never presume to impose that proportion in the NHL.

Parenthetically, STEM excludes many professions that ARE math-intensive such as economics and econometrics. There are many sharp women in those omitted fields. Ironically, women are under-represented in economics (30% by some measures) but I can sure you, depending upon the sub-field (eg in investment advisory, or risk management) their numbers are way higher. Personally, I believe a lot of this proportionality discussion is made muddy by poor data and people not understanding what they’re measuring. That’s a bigger problem, but also one not worth debating here right now.

Therefore, the margin for error is so razor thin, that any factor which increases the likelihood of any error at any stage erodes the ability of ANY organization to be a "High Reliability Organization", and over time, it is inevitable that there will be loss of life, property, and money. DEI and Affirmative Action ENSURE that that margin for error is eroded, and this is a conscious decision.

Here’s the 5%. The High Reliability Organization (HRO) has all sorts of less-than-optimal practices baked into its quantitative history. Favoritism, nepotism, affinity bias, and yea bigotry and the he-man women haters club are all pooled and included in that success rate.

Now, I’m not arguing that the government has an enumerated Constitutional power to regulate the hiring practices to optimize the HRO. Quite the contrary-Paxton and any leftist AG should back off. MYOB.

What I AM saying is that groupthink can be bad. So is your boss hiring his idiot buddy over promoting you. And so on.

Ingesting a wide range of input on a matter that draws from a diverse and informed pool of opinions and thoughts and experience often buffs out the scratches. Across many years of work in some cool HROs, this has always been my experience.

To be fair, that happened ORGANICALLY.

I will go further. I observed lots of less-than-optimal practices. I’m also privy to the occasion of such practices in some major firms and smaller companies. Those less-than-optimal practices wrecked heretofore HROs at the department and firm level.

Therefore, I’m not so quick to condemn firms that work on diversifying their talent pool.

Now, I’m not that stupid….diversification for the sake of diversification without any intent to optimize shareholder value is a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t matter if the diversity metric is age, race, who you want to kiss and then some, or whatever….you need to optimize.

I could go on, but I think you get my point on the 5%.

It is beyond the scope of our chat to examine the minutiae of where DEI for the sake of diversity uncoupled from shareholder - or taxpayer - value has replaced the fabric of America from a ‘may the best man/woman win.” However, lest you think I’m a DU plant(!), there was a story a few years ago from a leftish not-for-profit that embraced DEI and it lead to infighting, allies becoming targets of ire, departures, and a few implosions. It may collapse under its own weight. The closest I could get was this article. https://www.tlnt.com/articles/the-great-dei-resignation-why-are-so-many-diversity-heads-calling-it-quits.