Opinion by Megan McArdle: Workplaces need to fight bias, but “looking like America” is too simple a standard
to have a high school education or less, an impassable barrier to entry to most professional-class jobs.
So if your output consists mostly of English-language content, produced by college graduates, your workforce is unlikely to “look like America” in the broadest sense. Too many non-White Americans are still minor children, who are too busy learning algebra to make podcasts or write television scripts.
To achieve one important kind of fairness, then, managers would have to violate other ideas of fairness that also matter. And since age and racial discrimination are both illegal, they might end up violating the law, as well. That’s not to say that discrimination and structural disadvantage don’t also play a role in the lack of diversity at various organizations; of course the United States still has too much of both, unfortunately. To name just one obvious example, Black and Latino children arethan their White counterparts, so firms that require college diplomas are apt to end up disproportionately White. We need to do the urgent work of eliminating those kinds of gaps.
But it does mean that it’s important to account for generational effects when you’re trying to fix those other diversity issues. Otherwise you risk setting goals that are hard to meet legally, and setting yourself up for a lot of anguish when you fall short.