If a program treats people equally, that's a good thing. If you want equal outcomes (regardless of many very real factors), that by definition will require unequal treatment.
> Equality and Equity are vastly different things.
But related.
I was at a museum that had a full-sized submarine on display. There was a touchable model and audio description for blind people.
Equal, as much as possible - a Braille variant of a novel, for example, provides a fairly equal experience. Equitable, when perfect equal results are not possible. You can't fix a person's severed optic nerve, but you can certainly attempt to give them fair access to things.
DEI is a new name for and/or refinement of a long existing concept that gave us things like the abolitionists, suffragists, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Americans With Disabilities Act.
I disagree with this telling of history. DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s than it does with something like the Civil Rights Act and as such is a lot more controversial even among the groups it's meant to help.
> DEI has much more in common with various affirmative action efforts in the 80s and 90s
Affirmative Action was from Executive Order 11246 (1965) -- concurrent with and part of the same movement as civil rights legislation -- applying to federal contracting; it largely spread to large organizations that weren't direct federal contractors through subcontracting relationships and through state governments adopting similar requirements in their contracting.
> If the ADA was being proposed today, Republicans would decry it as yet another woke DEI effort.
A lot of the culture war entities which now dominate the GOP did so (obviously, with different language, as "woke" and "DEI" weren't the current generic epithets for things the Right doesn't like) at the time, but (1) were mollified in some cases with special exclusions, like religious schools being excluded from the definition of covered public accommodations, and (2) otherwise were less politically powerful within the party.
No, I’m describing equity in opportunity to learn.
Equal outcomes for all is not equity - it is inequitable for a deliberately lazy person to succeed when a hard working person does not, just because of something they were born with.
Giving every student the same printed packet is equal treatment, but unjust and inequitable to the blind student.
> Social equity within a society is different from social equality based on formal equality of opportunity. For example, person A may have no difficulty walking, person B may be able to walk but have difficulties with stairs, while person C may be unable to walk at all. Social equality would be treating each of those three people in the same way (by providing each with the same aids, or none), whereas social equity pursues the aim of making them equally capable of traversing public spaces by themselves (e.g. by installing lifts next to staircases and providing person C with a wheelchair).
It's part of making a product that works for a diverse group of people. The same way the XBox controller was made smaller for female and children hands. And how including darker skinned people in facial recognition systems is now standard practice.
I would say that DEI has sucked a huge amount of oxygen out of the room on accessibility. It's all out of the same budget, but as you can see, most people don't think of accessibility when they think of DEI, they think of race, gender and sexuality.
And out of those, accessibility is the one that has actual measurable metrics and requires expensive technical skill and compromises with non-accessible functions to implement well. Everything else on the list is PR work.
Yes I see you doing this all over the thread italicizing the same words and using them slightly differently, I'm not sure what point you're trying to prove.
ADA predates DEI by a couple decades. Lots of people, including Republicans, support the ADA and support expanding its protections.
This is a pretty standard tactic of partisans when their pet issue becomes unpopular - take something unrelated, or at best tangentially related, and pretend it's related or that that's what they've been advocating for all along.
I don't care if you support the ADA or you don't. I don't care if you support DEI or you don't. But they're different, they've never been related, and any attempt by partisans on the left to lump them together is just trying to reframe the issue as "against DEI == against the ADA" because of course everyone on the right hates disabled people right?
Scroll up a couple lines from your link and take a look at the sponsor, who Republicans nominated to be President. So no, your partisan assertion is nonsense.
Are we to think that the Republican party of 1990 - of the Bushes and the Cheneys and the Romneys - is the same as the Republican party of 2025 that has driven them out of the org?
The ADA requires accommodation. E.g. a blind software developer should be given an interview that does not require sight. So a text-only description instead of a figure or sketch would be accomodation. It does not require specific levels of representation. It is not analogous to Meta's former "representation goals".
> DEI would be hiring a blind person, over a more qualified non-blind person.
No, it wouldn't.
DEI might be things like expending resources for outreach to and soliciiting applications from the blind community because there were almost no blind applicants, when blind people could reasonably do the work even if, on average, blind people would be at a disadvantage compared to the sighted given the job responsibilities.
DEI would be concerned with encouraging applicants by and consideration of blind people to a role they can still effectively perform.
It's based on the generally logical idea that if your company with 10k people is staffed with 99% white males in a place where that doesn't reflect the workforce, the most logical conclusion is probably not "only white males can perform this role".
> Maybe men are indeed better firefighters than women generally?
On average? Maybe! The woman in that video looks like she could severely kick my ass; I strongly suspect she could carry me. (I also suspect there are multiple roles in a fire call, and "carry big man" may be balanced by "squeeze into tight spot" tasks at times.)
If you can't hear the joking tone in that statement in the video, I'm not sure how to help you. "You're in a fire, I'm helping you, don't look a gift horse in the mouth."
Yes, she is making fun of people who say that increasing the number of women firefighters will result in more people dying. I think firefighting is an extreme example, where the actual job competence should be the most important qualification, and DEI should absolutely have no place.
> I think firefighting is an extreme example, where the actual job competence should be the most important qualification, and DEI should absolutely have no place.
DEI simply posits "there are probably some women just as qualified (or more!) as some of the men you already hire, so be open to it and perhaps encourage their consideration". Very few organizations manage to hire the absolute best person on the planet for a particular role and over-estimate the extent to which their interview process manages to successfully filter for it.
There are absolutely differences between men and women, but there's a lot of overlap. The absolute six-sigma ends of the bell curves likely matter if you're, say, at the Olympics, but my local fire department has visibly overweight men in their 60s on staff.
And that's fine! But it probably tells you that quite a few women (like the one in your video) are also capable of doing what they do - of which a significant portion is not carrying unconscious people out of burning houses.
(I've selected male/female simply as an example here. There'll be different excuses offered for not hiring black firefighters or gay firefighters in reasonable proportions.)
It is known that the physical strength distributions of women and men have very little overlap. Only the strongest of women are stronger than the weakest of men. This matters because firefighters are usually selected with physical tests, and most men would fail these tests. If women can pass the same tests, obviously they should be selected. As said in the video, 5% of firefighters are women, which sounds fine.
However, this is not what DEI is about. DEI is about seeing that 5% as a too small number, and trying to increase the number by lowering standards for women. Letting everyone apply is enough.
It's impressive that not only do you post the most asinine of rage bait possible but you also somehow took the quote out of context and wildly misrepresented said quote as well.
