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Old 22-07-2022, 01:09   #1757
Hugh
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Re: Police to get tough on internet trolls.

Quote:
Originally Posted by Pierre View Post
Unconscious bias is another white elephant.

I’m not saying it doesn’t exist, but bias exists across all race, sex, age, class, looks. Etc you name it.

To look at it at a base level, if you were male and recruiting for a position and two equally qualified women applied. One looked like Beyoncé and one was a fat ginger girl from Rotherham I’m pretty sure I know which way your unconscious bias would lean. You could swap old ginger, for bald, short fat bloke = same result.

It isn’t just black people and woman that are victims, everyone is and I would argue older people are the most.

Everybody has bias, that’s just the way it is.

Positive discrimination, quotas, etc is just discrimination and it always seems to go just one way.

We recently just had Women in Engineering day. A big fan fair to get more women in engineering as they are under-represented. No problem with that. But firms like VM are pursuing 50/50 representation in their engineering base. Which is unrealistic and not good for the business as they’re not getting the best engineers.

But where is the men in nursing day, men in primary teaching day, men in caring day?

We should do more to encourage everyone to pursue the paths they want, but do you think the reason there aren’t many women engineers is because they don’t want to do it?
The point of unconscious bias is exactly the point you make - we all have preferences, and like hires like, be that in teaching, IT, caring, etc.

To (try and) mitigate those preferences, it’s important to reduce the impact of those unconscious biases - remove identifying info from CVs, so people get to the next stage on the info on their CV, not by their names/sex/ethnicity. Then have diverse interview panels - if the interview panel for nursery teachers is made up of all women, they are likely to hire more of the same (just like in IT/engineering if it’s all men).

It’s not about positive discrimination, it’s about trying to create a level playing field…

Re the over-representation of one sex in certain professions, I actually had that conversation with a previous boss (a University Vice-Chancellor, female), who commented on the overwhelming preponderance of men in our IT Department - I agreed with her, and explained the actions we were taking to balance this (as above), but pointed out that perhaps the same issue should be looked at in Libraries (University), as their staffing levels were equally misbalanced with women…

---------- Post added at 00:09 ---------- Previous post was at 00:07 ----------

Quote:
Originally Posted by OLD BOY View Post
Don’t be ridiculous, Hugh.Is there nothing you won’t argue about?

‘Those people ‘ were those that were mentioned. Obviously.

This kind of pedantry is what many of us are concerned about with this legislation. Disrupters will be able to pick up and complain about anything.

Thanks for making the point for me, though.
You’re not making the point you think you are…
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