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L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

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Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Internet arguments aside, the fact that certain cultural groups push their children to study hard (and also provide them with as many resources as possible to make sure their studies are fruitful) probably is a big contributor to the disparity illustrated in your table.

It does not seem to have helped non-Jewish whites any, compared to Blacks and Hispanics. I guess it's a very special kind of studiousness whites have - one that helps with SAT scores, but not Ivy League admissions: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

Anecdotally, it absolutely has. The people I knew growing up (regardless of race) whose parents encouraged educational excellence were far more likely to attain it.

(Looking at your link, it's important to note that it doesn't separate Jewish and non-Jewish Whites.)

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In this case, you're saying that Jewish students are 11x more hard-working than Hispanic ones, and Asian students are 6x more hard-working than Black ones? Does Michael Phelps (23 Olympic gold medals) swim 23x faster than Mack Horton (1 Olympic gold medal)?

Fine. N-times more likely to be hard-working enough for the Ivy League.

There are indeed racial disparities in time spent on academics [1].

1. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2017/...

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those arguments don't really work for gender discrimination or discrimination against African-Americans. It's not as if women or black people only just got here.

The law that was struck down lumps everyone who isn’t a straight white male into the same category. At least as to race, the majority of non-whites are immigrants or children of immigrants, so immigration recency is an important factor that laws like this fail to consider. Moreover, the category of “white” is deceptive. I suspect that corporate boards have few people of Appalachian descent, and many people of New Eng…

The difficulty is that as a society we have already gone some way towards identifying protected group status, even though there is some disagreement near the edges. The definition does not cover the distinction between people of Scots-Irish descent living in Appalachia and those from Northern English Puritan descent with a history in New England. Perhaps it should, but it currently does not, and so until we shift the broad definition of protected group status, that sort of distinction is casually tossed into the "don't care" bin by current social and legal norms.

I personally am in the "class matters more in terms of discriminiation than race", but I acknowledge serious and well-intentioned and well-informed objections to this understanding. I would prefer to see us focus on class-based discrimination (with class defined primarily in economic terms), because I think this more equitable and ultimately gives us greater (social) bang for each (legal) buck. That said, the category of "underrepresented" in the CA law is broadly (though not precisely) in line with current legal understanding, and I'm not sure it's based on a different concept that current civil rights laws or jurisprudence. The real issue is whether the state can pro-actively discriminate in an attempt to remediate the discrimination it has stated as its target.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a sibling reply said, I'm not making an argument. I'm asking for the relevance of your reply to the statement you replied to. I think there are a lot of confounding factors to the data you presented, so personally consider it to hold very little value on its own. You're the one who seems to draw meaning from it. So, what meaning do you draw from it? What explanation do you have for these discrepancies? How do they…

Don't be deliberately obtuse. Of course you were making an argument. You were making it sarcastically, to be sure, but it was still an argument dismissing the data presented as irrelevant because it doesn't purport to show the level of effort from the groups involved. And it's a spurious argument in any case, because the data presented still shows a major issue in the initial claim, which was that non-white students…

> initial claim, which was that non-white students need to expend significantly more effort than white students to be accepted into the Ivy League

You've added a whole bunch of words here that weren't in any claim of this thread. The person I was replying to is the one who brought students and school acceptance into it. I've double checked the whole thread to make sure, so if I missed it please point it out. The conversation above car_analogy's post was about business leadership.

At any rate, while of course I'm being a little obtuse, I really do not know what car_analogy is driving at. I can speculate, but I suspect I'd be accused of being uncharitable if I said my speculation out loud. It's not up to me to make their argument for them, and they didn't even bother to make one.

Anyways,

> If you think other factors are the cause of that

Fortunately, as I'm not the person who threw a snark bomb into the thread tied to a table of tenuously related data, it's not my job to interpret the data I don't think is significant to the argument at hand. If car_analogy wants to convince me of its relevance, they can say more than two words about it and then get defensive.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does not seem to have helped non-Jewish whites any, compared to Blacks and Hispanics. I guess it's a very special kind of studiousness whites have - one that helps with SAT scores, but not Ivy League admissions: https://www.brookings.edu/research/race-gaps-in-sat-scores-h...

Anecdotally, it absolutely has. The people I knew growing up (regardless of race) whose parents encouraged educational excellence were far more likely to attain it. (Looking at your link, it's important to note that it doesn't separate Jewish and non-Jewish Whites.)

But it looks at all students (not only those that make it into the Ivies), so Jewish whites, that are only ~4% of all whites, have a minuscule effect on white SAT scores. Yet, for non-Jewish whites, comparatively higher SAT scores have not translated into higher Ivy enrollment.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#176
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming discrimination exists in order to justify discriminatory policies in response is a doozy of a begging the question fallacy. > What argument is there to explain the underrepresentation that doesn't ultimately confirm that it is actually discrimination? There are myriad reasons applicable to different groups. Age and immigration status are big ones. Almost all of the so-called “bamboo ceiling” (the theory that…

Those arguments don't really work for gender discrimination or discrimination against African-Americans. It's not as if women or black people only just got here.

For women and Black people both, full participation in work and politics wasn't really permitted until the mid-late 20th century.

Re: L.A. judge rules LGBT corporate diversity law unconstitutional

#178
post #2

This seems like the right decision (and I'm saying this as an LGBT person). The problem is, it just doesn't seem like legislation is the right instrument for promoting diversity in boardrooms. But what is the right mechanism? I anecdotally recall studies that found organizations with greater diversity deliver better financial results, and that public companies have a responsibility to their shareholders. It's importa…

The only companies that can afford to diversity hire are already having great financial results
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