Yeah. They have gone through a schooling system full of 'positive' discrimination. As amusing as it is to say that I only have negative things to say about positive discrimination I actually feel that it is often terribly implemented, and that those who run round spouting such labels are often (though not always) the wrong people to be involved in enacting positive discrimination.
Before enacting any form of discrimination ask yourself this - is the group I am discriminating actually the group I want to target, or are they a proxy group?
It is all too easy to cite a gender paygap on the assumption that men and women both want the same things, but this isn't true. If you go to the wikipedia page [0] for 'Gender pay gap' you will find that direct discrimination is a very small part of the pay gap, and if you follow through to the EU links [1] you will find it is littered with the assumption that men and women should want the same things (work/life balance, family life, etc.).
To my mind the category of 'woman' is not a good one for assesing pay discrimination. It is an interesting proxy group yes, but it doesn't provide a useful means of going forward. You need to identify causes and treat the causes without discrimination from your proxy, only based on your member group.
Teaching negotiation strategies is a good thing to do, that treats a real problem. If you only teach women (as 'women in work' groups do) you create problems for men who aren't good, as they are now very likely to be the worst negotiators. If instead you use a real metric (say an evaluation for poor negotiation skills) as an entry requirement for the program you aren't hurting anybody and you are reducing one of the real portions of the gender pay gap.
In other words actually solving problems is hard and net positive, but using prejudices to simplify your problem is easy and can be zero-sum or even negative.
Some problems with your example of "teaching negotiation strategies":
- It assumes that discriminatory outcomes are solely created by behavioural differences (i. e. "Women would earn the same if only they were better negotiators"). While nobody is denying that behaviour is a contributing factor, it's hard to deny that there is some direct discrimination going on[0]
- It takes the existing structures as god-given, unchangeable fact, i. e. "Compensation is set in an adversarial negotiation".
- It assumes that the outcome of a process cannot be discriminatory if gender/race/age/... weren't direct inputs into the process, i. e. "we'd love to have more African-American engineers, but the Lacrosse-requirement has always been part of our hiring process".
- It places the full burden of change on the group that is discriminated against, i. e. "Teach women to act more like white men when negotiating".
- It fais to answer the question "What should I, an African-American, do to lower my chances of being shot at any random traffic stop?"
[0]: from your Wikipedia link: "A 2007 study showed that for identical resumes fewer replies were sent to men compared with women (it also showed that women do worse when they have children, while men do worse when they don't).[66] Another study showed more jobs for women when orchestras moved to blind auditions"
* the negotiation example was taken from the EU summary article as an example not based on the persons choice
* the gist of my argument is that people aren't all the same and have predispositions
* the 'stop yourself getting shot' argument is ridiculous. I was highlighting that discrimination based on proxy groups is bad. As for what to do if you are being discriminated against? Don't go for 'positive' doscrimination, identify the group you are being used as a proxy for and convince the people with power that you aren't them. Of course it isn't easy, but at least it doesn't shove thr problem onto somebody else.
Before enacting any form of discrimination ask yourself this - is the group I am discriminating actually the group I want to target, or are they a proxy group?
It is all too easy to cite a gender paygap on the assumption that men and women both want the same things, but this isn't true. If you go to the wikipedia page [0] for 'Gender pay gap' you will find that direct discrimination is a very small part of the pay gap, and if you follow through to the EU links [1] you will find it is littered with the assumption that men and women should want the same things (work/life balance, family life, etc.).
To my mind the category of 'woman' is not a good one for assesing pay discrimination. It is an interesting proxy group yes, but it doesn't provide a useful means of going forward. You need to identify causes and treat the causes without discrimination from your proxy, only based on your member group.
Teaching negotiation strategies is a good thing to do, that treats a real problem. If you only teach women (as 'women in work' groups do) you create problems for men who aren't good, as they are now very likely to be the worst negotiators. If instead you use a real metric (say an evaluation for poor negotiation skills) as an entry requirement for the program you aren't hurting anybody and you are reducing one of the real portions of the gender pay gap.
In other words actually solving problems is hard and net positive, but using prejudices to simplify your problem is easy and can be zero-sum or even negative.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap
[1] - http://ec.europa.eu/justice/gender-equality/gender-pay-gap/c...