Stale, male and pale

The "meritocracy" comment always seems to come up when lack of diversity is mentioned. "Oh, we must promote the best person for the job". It comes up at my workplace a lot at the moment as they're struggling with diversity and the old white men at the top don't like the implied insults associated with highlighting their bias.

If take the "meritocracy" line of logic to it's full extent...

• apparently it's a meritocracy, and this is a superior by virtue of being "fair" (thus making anyone arguing against you appear to favour unfairness)
• as it's a meritocracy (apparently) in the past the best person for the job has been chosen
• coincidentally the best person for the job is often an old, white, man (not ageist, accurate. Sometimes they are young, this is rarer)
• by extension, this is because PoC and women must just be less competent...

Really, REALLY? They want to use a "meritocracy" argument and expect it to not be wildly offensive?? It makes me Very Cross (DH may have been on the receiving end of this rant a few times!).

How very ageist, sexist and racist of you all.

The backlash on the comments section of the BBC News website after that comment was fairly strong.

Lots of comments along the lines of how it's wrong to unfairly promote women and PoC etc etc. They want the right people for the job, but they can never envisage that the right person for the job might be a woman or PoC, what they really mean is, they want the right white man for the job.

It's maybe slightly ageist but it's more "no fresh ideas, been in the job too long". Gove, Hague and Clarke are all very different ages.

The only thing I'm a bit wary of is the "stale" part, because I'm not sure whether that's an ageist thing, or whether it's referring to their values/practices/opinions/behaviour/background etc - if solely the latter then fine. Mind you, men tend not to come in for the ageist crap so much anyway, so maybe I'm being over sensitive on their behalf

The rest - absolutely!