If you're all about diversity ...

Me but I've been piled on a lot for pointing out the anti-feminism on here recently.
It's shocking, yes.

Is anyone else seeing this? I feel like I stepped into a parallel forum.

It’s not odd at all. It’s a well-established theme in feminism that instead of pushing women to be more like men, we should place a higher value on the activities many women actually want to do. To me it is completely plausible that more men than women want to be CEOs

Group preference?? Not in fact hundreds of years of culturally ingrained sexism and racism.

You’re kidding, right?

Please say you’re just messing around, because it’s very weird otherwise, and worrying to see this line taken in a feminist space.

The reasons for inequalities in birth outcomes are really complex and healthcare leaders should be focused on identifying and solving them. I don’t think this means the work has to be done by black women themselves and this just seems tangential to me. Focus on solving the actual problem, instead of fiddling with your recruitment policy.

There are many health inequalities and we don’t say that the answer is more representative recruitment of sex workers or gypsy/Roma people into the health service. We say, focus on the problem and engaging proactively with communities if necessary.

I think most of the differences you cite are the result of social/educational inequality and group preference, not racism/sexism. Having more women in positions of power may help with initiatives against male violence but I don’t think you should artificially engineer them into those positions

Definitely, but you can't just hire black/brown midwives and expect that to make a difference. You also have to focus on structural issues such as access to health care, especially considering how much harder it is for women in precarious employment to take time off for appointments.

Also, really tricky things, such as the proportion of women with limited English or ESL using family as translators and the difficulties that can cause linked to accuracy of translation and the possibility of coercive control.

Then you have to have better research and education about variance in health markers across races, and you need to be implementing these changes from early in the antenatal care to help educate the mothers as well as the medical staff.

My experience of DEI is that it is being implemented badly by people who are focused on headline numbers over actual opportunities.

I used to manage teams of call centre staff for a bank. I came into the team from head office off the graduate scheme. There was a lot of hostility because it was assumed I'd been hired because I was a woman when obviously I knew I was very capable of doing the role and proved so. But actually I realised they weren't 100% wrong either.

The teams were mostly entry level, shift work hours, part time readily available and staff were pretty much white and south Asian working class men and women from the surrounding area. The higher up the ladder you got, the less flexibility there was, which meant that as you got higher there were more men and less women, as most of the women (especially the Asian women) were mothers and were expected to prioritise caring responsibilities.

By the time it got to my level, there were only men. Obviously that reflected badly so in I was brought as a younger, middle class, white, university graduate woman from out of area to manage a very local, working class team and, unofficially, balance out the numbers. The bank could have reviewed the role, enabled job share, done something to address the structural issues that meant that the S.A. women with tonnes of experience never applied for the job, but that was too hard, so they hired in instead.

Getting more black and brown women into positions of power as decision makers in healthcare is absolutely connected to reducing the mortality gap for back and brown women in childbirth, and the associated infant mortality rate.

Multiple studies have evidenced this.

Presuming you’re not OK with black and brown women and babies dying at 5 times the rate of white women and babies, that’s an area where diversity initiatives are not only welcome, but vital.

Women CEOs in FTSE 100 UK companies : 8%

Black CEOs ditto: 2% and falling

Gender pay gap 14% (with men on the upside, in case you weren’t sure)

Not even close to equality, and in fact getting worse.

FYI there are initiatives to get more men into caring roles, and more women into offshore oil posts.

@Bananaspread does it not occur to you that having more women in positions of power, as decision makers, will go a long way to getting policy and legal change that better protects women and girls from male violence?

The cart can’t come before getting the right horses.

I agree. Diversity of thought is as valuable to a company as any other diversity.

There's outward diversity then inward imo. I worked for a company that was very racially diverse (recruited from all over the world) but ended up with just the MC people from all over, so we all thought the same, went to the same places on holiday (e.g. in 2015-19 i feel like everyone went to the Chedi in Muscat 🤣). There wasn't a lot of diversity of experience because it was all the same "sort" if person who had been to all the same big unis. I loved it there as i easily connected with everyone but it was an international MC bubble. The sector in general is very like this.

I am 100% a feminist but I think we have got close enough to equality in the workplace, apart from a few specific issues (eg pregnancy discrimination). Obviously discrimination still happens, but much much less systematically than in the past. We do need to ensure that people have access to legal redress which is certainly an issue. My area of focus now is violence and sexual violence against women where there is still a really long way to go.

Women were restricted in the formal workforce due to structural (legal to fire a woman when she married) and practical barriers (eg non stop pregnancy). Almost all of these have been swept away. The divide now is between people who believe in equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes. Equality of opportunity mostly exists in terms of ethnicity and sex, but not social class. Addressing equality of opportunity for poor people is really difficult, so employers fixate on the easy things (race and sex) which have more or less already been solved. Pivoting towards equality of outcome inevitably means either reducing standards for particular groups or encouraging people into areas that don’t interest/suit them. Again this is weirdly selective: no one is pushing for equality of outcome in terms of women on oil rigs or men in childcare, for example.

How is this shocking? It’s one tiny correction to begin to claw back from the hundreds of years of women being actively excluded from boss positions in the city.

Have we stepped through a looking glass into a board where feminists don’t want women to have a chance at the same opportunity the blokes have been enjoying all this time?

You can imagine all you like but unless you’re a mind reader or a sock puppet you’re just inventing things so you “win”

Thats not what I said - and my post is still there so people can see for themselves that I said the comment read as racist by implying unqualified black people were positions as pilots and doctors.

mnhq presumably also felt the post I was commenting on came over as racist since it’s now been deleted (I did not report it)

The poster was deleted so obviously was saying something against guidelines.

You said the poster was racist for saying that black people couldn't be good doctors or pilots. She said nothing like that. You were the one that misrepresented what was being said. If you wanted confirmation of her factual claims you should have said that.

Here's the kind of thing I imagine she was thinking of:

View from the Wing - Diversity in the skies

Yes !!! In my work place (large firm in the City), when they were looking for a replacement for my boss, it has been made very clear that firm wanted to hire a women and only women for that position. Shocking.

Is that really your answer? You know it is no wonder people think you are disingenuous, play the ball, Cassie.

The post being responding to talked about reduction of standards in certain professional certifications, justified in order to bring in more non-white candidates.

The poster mentioned doctors and pilots. I can't speak to those but I know it's gone on in the military, and for a time with air craft controllers, though I believe that was eventually reversed.

It's very similar to the trend, in US schools, to reduce math standards because of uneven performance across racial groups.

It’s odd logic because you invented it. My post doesn’t say anything like that.

Do you even have a single shred of evidence of this supposed reduction of requirements that you say results in under-skilled black people flying planes or treating patients?

Strawmanning is quite a widespread problem on here

And did you have a problem when the Conservatives voted to axe "Sure Start", a strategic investment to do just that?

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-68763942.amp

I feel like to some there is a dog in the manger element to this - "why should they get special treatment?" rather than any actual concern about dealing with the issues at hand

ive been reading this thread and im sorry but i think you've misrepresented what the earlier post said?
They talked about increasing opportunity, nothing about reducing standards?
My own workplace started advertising jobs in a wider range of publications as we felt we weren't reaching all of our possible applicants by using the standard/traditional industry tools, we now have more applications from a wider demographic. We haven't changed our requirements one bit, but we feel we have a much stronger pool to choose from now