Some thoughts on quotas

[andrewducker]

In f-locked discussion elsewhere I was talking about quotas, people's aversion to them, and what can be done about them.

I feel iffy about quotas. Not because they'd be acting against me[1], but because they always feel like a terribly blunt tool to attack a problem with, and they seem to inflame people a lot whenever they come up[2], and cause lots of short-term anger. Some people will feel that blunt instruments are necessary, some will feel very strongly that reverse-discrimination is still discrimination (and thus wrong), and the discussions are frequently made of more heat than light, what with the demonising of people with opposing opinions.

Personally, what I'd like is for people to _think_ more and consider the situation[3], try to make it better, and be clear (when they haven't made it better) what they tried to do. Which is why I wouldn't be in favour of saying simply "50% of all X must be Y.", but I would be in favour of requiring, when certain levels weren't met, that people had to explain _why_.

So, taking the recent example of conventions[4], you could set a minimum level at 40% of either gender (thus allowing for a 3:2 split on a five member panel), and while any given panel could have any actual split, any one which breached the 40% would have to log an explanation saying something like "All five of the world-renowned experts in this field are female." or "We asked our friends, we put up posters, we sent out mass emails, but only one woman was willing to be on this panel."

This would then mean that people at least _looked_ at the figures, had a think about it, and then probably put in some effort because they wanted to avoid the paperwork. Because, frankly, avoiding paperwork is a prime motivator to most people, and enough to spur them into doing the right thing.



[1]They would, because I'm middle-class, earn above average, am not part of a minority that's terribly visible or picked on where I live, etc. But I'd be happy if they did so, because frankly I got a lot of help along the way.
[2]Many people do not like the idea of reverse discrimination. Some people do not like the idea that (for instance) a Chinese person would be placed in the situation where people could question where they actually got the job on merit, or whether it was just to fill a quota.
[3]This bit applies to negative situations in general, not just ones that quotas are a plausible solution for.
[4]Paul Cornell announced that he would not appear on any panel that wasn't 50% female. Other people are now questioning why any panel shouldn't be representative of the general population.

Comments

[ironjeff]

The (American) National Football League has the "Rooney Rule" - named for the owners of the Pittsburgh Steelers:

Whenever a coaching position opens, the team MUST interview and consider a certain 'quota' of minorities for the position... The league doesn't really care who the team hires, but they DO want to ensure that suitable candidates aren't omitted from the process by dint of race.

After this rule was put into effect, it was soon no longer unusual to see non-Anglos on the sidelines...

Maybe Concoms could use something similar when setting up the invite lists for panels.

As an aside, is this a mostly European issue, or fandom-wide? I've been mostly out of circulation for a few years, but the only folks I personally know who get put on panels at cons are all female...

[andrewducker]

I believe that similar changes occurred when orchestras started doing blind interviews, where they couldn't see the person playing the instrument.

[nickys]

A friend of mine in London started getting a lot more job interviews when he switched to using his (white) mother's surname instead of his (African) father's surname on his CV.

[nickys]

Quotas could potentially be useful where there's a suspicion that people are finding excuses not to hire women/minorities/disabled people etc.
If the reason why the white guy always gets the job sounds like "he was the best fir for the team" then yes, he probably was, since the team consists of a load of other white guys... which is the point that a quota is designed to sort out by blunt force.

I'm in favour of a degree of positive discrimination where environmental factors prevent people attaining the same qualifications etc.
For example, people without rich parents shouldn't be excluded from being architects or archaeologists because they couldn't spend a year doing unpaid work experience...
... I shouldn't lose engineering jobs because girls' high schools in the early 1980s didn't routinely offer technical drawing courses, and my first one didn't offer physics either...

[steer.livejournal.com]

The university system has for about twenty years used your system -- no quotas but instead rigorous surveys of which groups are under represented and questions asked to interview panels as to why appointments are made which do not move towards equality. Indeed, in order to even sit on an interview panel, I needed to be trained in UK discrimination legislation (turns out I *can* refuse to employ someone for voting tory). So this is, as you suggest, putting soft pressure on the system to move towards equal representation of women, ethnic minorities and so on.

I think the last time I looked we might reach equality between men and women in about sixty or seventy years. Obviously the other underrepresented groups will take a bit longer.

[marrog.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I mean, I'm a pretty strong proponent of affirmative action even though I find it problematic, just like anyone with a brain, but I do agree that 'targets' are more desirable than 'quotas' if I may make that semantic distinction. Always aim for equal representation, but is it too much to ask that we're not 'silly' about it?

[steer.livejournal.com]

Well, the university system is definitely "targets" not "quotas" -- depends how you feel about a timeframe which is beyond the working life of anyone currently living (unless we get a few more raises to pension age).

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

My prediction:

"We asked our friends, we put up posters, we sent out mass emails, but only one woman was willing to be on this panel."

"Maybe we shouldn't have booked Dave Sim, Harlan Ellison, and Leo Frankowski first before looking for any women, but, hey, it's not our fault women are stupid and weak and can't handle debate. Really."

A little paperwork, in order to Make A Statement? I can see the usual suspects being all over that.

[feorag.livejournal.com]

I left the Green Party (in England) over quotas. At the time, they had (might still have, as far as I know) the OWOW programme. OWOW, Other Ways of Working, was basically the party experimenting with doing its business in different ways to see if it increased participation across the membership. This is fine and good, and I supported it, and it appeared to be working.

Then, one year, they decided what they needed to increase female participation was quotas, and that the national executive would have to be at least 50% female.

Trouble was, at the time, OWOW had clearly been working as the national executive was about 70% female.

I was sufficiently offended to leave the party over it, marginally reducing the proportion of women in the party.

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

Also, about quotas: they're a blunt instrument, sure, but when the applicant pool is 50% women and the people HIRED are 0% women, then either you've got 0% qualified women, or you've got a biased hiring process.

It is trivial to demonstrate that "0% qualified women" is not the case.
Therefore, your hiring process is biased.

And it's self-evident that you either think it's unbiased, know it's biased and can't find the bias, or know it's biased and don't want to correct the bias. One of those three situations must be true - and in all cases, setting a quota corrects the problem.

Which means, a quota may be a blunt instrument, but it's one that corrects the problem NO MATTER why the problem exists. Which is an impressive trick for a single tool!

Some people do not like the idea that (for instance) a Chinese person would be placed in the situation where people could question where they actually got the job on merit

The problem there at the core is the racist assumption that a Chinese person *could not be* as qualified. I'm reminded of something autobotsrollout said about choosing Sonia Sotomayor for the US Supreme Court: Yes, they pre-emptively disqualified all white male protestant justices from consideration, because, and this is important, there is NO shortage of qualified other justices, and there is a MARKED shortage of other justices on the court.

[calum]

Also, about quotas: they're a blunt instrument, sure, but when the applicant pool is 50% women and the people HIRED are 0% women, then either you've got 0% qualified women, or you've got a biased hiring process.

of course, your applicant pool could also be 2% women, because your company has a reputation for sexist hiring practices and none apply, or because your advertising is unconsciously sexist, or even just because no women work for you yet.

Quotas help you get started when things are really broken..

[lil-shepherd.livejournal.com]

A further problem with quotas is the percentage of the qualified pool.

For instance, to take a specific instance outside fandom: you may be a government department with a strong equal opps policy and, overall, a high percentage of women and a decent National percentage of ethnic minorities, but most of your recruitment is in to the lowest grades where, because of this, your women and ethnic minorities are concentrated, and you have a low turnover in the middle and higher grades where the posts are mainly filled by well-qualified white men who are not due to retire for at least another ten years and who you cannot sack and do not want to sack because they are doing a good job in posts that need knowledge and experience, and, anyway, if you did you would not be allowed to replace them because the government would fall on the 'savings' with glee.

At this point, even if you insist on a quota of women and ethnic minorities filling promotions into vacancies, it is going to take years (forty at least from the implementation of the equal opps policy) to get to the percentages you are aiming for in the higher grades and certain parts of the country.

You will find that, while there are women who like military SF (say) and men who write fan fiction, the percentages are against gender equality on those panels.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

"um, no" to the possibility of requiring 5 nominees to be 3:2.
Real life statistics will not do that. If there is no gender bias, there will be slates of 3:2, 4:1, and occasionally but noticeably, 5:0.

[andrewducker]

If pulling names randomly out of a hat, yes. If actively choosing people, no.

[steer.livejournal.com]

Well actually I think apostle is right. Consider this perfect world experiment:
Your hiring pool is a large sample of an equal number of men and women. Talent has the same statistical distribution for all people (so women are not better than men and vice versa).
You unerring pick the most talented 5 people.
You will get the following ratios
1/16th time 5:0 (one way or the other).
5/16th time 4:1 (one way or the other).
10/16th = 5/8th time 3:2 (one way or the other).

Almost half the time you will get something which looks (to someone who doesn't train in statistics) very biased. This is because people are very bad at assessing these things and so "4 men only one woman" or "4 women only one man" looks dodgy.
If you didn't watch out for this you'd end up introducing a quota system on something perfectly unbiased.
Of course we don't actually live on this world at all, indeed nothing like it... so the issue is not one we should worry about too much.
In general though it would be a bad idea to apply such a quota system when the number of people you're looking it is "small".

In larger systems the law of large numbers saves you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_large_numbers

If the distribution is 4 men and 1 woman on the panel then it's not necessarily a problem.
If the distriubtion is 400 men and 100 women on 100 panels then it's almost certainly problem (with a p-value I can't be bothered to calculate).

[andrewducker]

"You unerring pick the most talented 5 people."
I thought that point was that you didn't do that, if you had quotas.

If you are merely reporting cases when you went outside of the guidelines, then yes, absolutely.

[steer.livejournal.com]

I thought that point was that you didn't do that, if you had quotas.

Yes... but that's a different point. If your quota system is correctly specified then an unbiased group of people choosing within an equal talent pool should never (or almost never) be affected by it (because those people don't NEED a quota system).

The fact that (in the example) unbiased people are being swayed in their choice by a quota system shows the quota system picked is a wrong one. It's easy to come up with quota systems which are "equal" but also "stupid". For a really obvious example, we number jobs in order and for even numbered jobs hire a man and odd numbered jobs hire a woman. Hooray, equality! But it's too strong a requirement. You could achieve the equality requirement with a much much looser quota system.

If you're choosing a quota system (or even a "guideline" system) it needs to work on larger numbers than the numbers you are talking about or it simply won't get sensible results.

[andrewducker]

If your quota system is correctly specified then an unbiased group of people choosing within an equal talent pool should never (or almost never) be affected by it (because those people don't NEED a quota system).

That works if you have reporting over a large group of people, but makes it hard to tell whether one particular case is very biased.

If we use the system I recommend, whereby you merely report back why you deviated from the quota. In which case if you pick all men for a role you need to justify that "They really all were better, the women who applied were all of lower quality." - and if one person consistently comes out on one side of the curve then you can investigate in more detail, and you have the paperwork to start with.

[steer.livejournal.com]

That works if you have reporting over a large group of people, but makes it hard to tell whether one particular case is very biased.

It is always hard to tell whether one particular case is biased... that's the very unfortunate problem with these things.

If we use the system I recommend, whereby you merely report back why you deviated from the quota.

I assumed that the point of your system is that it would modify people's behaviour. If your intent is that people do what they would anyway but fill in some paperwork then there's no additional problems introduced.

If, on the other hand, in your system you have some kind of expectation people will move towards being "less biased" by trying to ensure that ratio are 3:2 in groups of 5 then it has the risks I described by operating on small groups.

[andrewducker]

I think that making people justify themselves will make them think "Do I really want to do X, was it the right thing to do?", and justify it to themselves before they justify it to other people. Faced with having to justify hiring a group all of one gender the better people will nail their justifications down, the worse ones will switch out someone for a member of the other gender. The latter strikes me as a negative effect, but I would have thought the overall effect will be to make people consider what they are doing, which should be an overall benefit.

[steer.livejournal.com]

You may be right that overall the good in your system outweighs the bad... I'd still feel a little cautious about it though.

[andrewducker]

I think that it would almost certainly dissuade people from just going with the "My four mates would be awesome on this panel" approach which tends to lead to the current situation. It would almost certainly have some negative effects (any system does).

[naath.livejournal.com]

Recall that auditioning musicians "blind" (without seeing them) resulted in many more women getting jobs in orchestras - the hiring people had actually deluded themselves into thinking that the men "just played better" and they were "simply hiring the best players", but when they couldn't see if the person was a man or a woman it turned out that women play well too.

Justifications aren't always true, even if the person saying them really believes they are.

yes

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

That's the math I was thinking of.
If you occasionally have a 5:0 ratio or a 4:1 ratio, that by itself does not indicate bias. In fact, having no 5:0s or 4:1s indicates bias.

[naath.livejournal.com]

If your aim is to have the 5 best individuals this is true. If you aim is to have the "best panel possible" then you might find that panel-goodness increases with diversity (a diversity of perspectives might lead to a better panel). (Please not "might"s I actually have no experience of picking the best panel for any such event).

Also if your goal is to "decrease the perception that SFF fandom is entirely made up of white men" then you will almost certainly find that putting more women and non-white people on your panels will assist in that goal even if you might have had a marginally better discussion with an all-white-male panel (because those white men were more expert/interesting in the subject). Aiming at these perceptions of inequality can help decrease levels of actual inequality later.

[artkouros.livejournal.com]

Hard quotas are never a good idea, but hiring a diverse staff is. I'm old enough to remember when universities did not take black students and the only jobs for women were nurses and secretaries. It takes a couple of generations at least to prime the pumps for a truly equal and diverse society. At first maybe you have to give jobs preferentially to less qualified minorities so that their children have the educational advantages that come wih professional parents and can then compete on an even playing field.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

nurses and schoolteachers for professional jobs
and gee, now that women have more options, both those careers are in bad trouble without the pool of underpriced talent they used to have . . .

[danieldwilliam.livejournal.com]

Funnily I was thinking about quotas myself just the other day & came to a not dissimilar view.