'Women and other minority genders'

[VeryLittleOwl]

Just seen this on the bottom of the job advert for a new Chair of Historic Environment Scotland's board of trustees.

"Scottish Ministers particularly welcome applications from groups currently under-represented on Scotland's public bodies such as women and other minority genders, disabled people, ethnic minorities, people aged under 50, people that identify as LGBTI."

applications.appointed-for-scotland.org/pages/job_search_view.aspx?jobId=3954&JobIndex=1&categoryList=&minsal=0&maxsal=150000&workingPatternList=&keywords=&PageIndex=1&Number=10

Speechless!!

It's diversity of thought and experience that makes the difference to organisations, which sometimes fits with protected characteristics and sometimes doesn't, e.g. if you've got a mix of men and women, ages, ethnic groups, LGBetc., but they all come from private schools and Russell Group unis, you haven't actually got a huge amount of diversity in many ways - I suspect this is the case for various national charities. Then there are other life experiences don't appear on the list but might massively shape your chances, such as adverse childhood experiences, DV or SV, or being a lone parent for example. I also wonder about the over 50s, and the balance of men and women in that, as women's experience (menopause, caring or parenting responsibilities and career gone south as a result) is v different to men's. There are more organisations that do ask for lived experience but really haven't thought through what they're asking people to disclose and whether there will be any support for them.

Why can't they just accept applications from human beings, and select the one that they judge will do the job best? Unless they're going to be recruiting using positive discrimination. Perhaps all the applicants should claim to be "queer" to be in with a chance....

...Why? Affirmative action, that's why. From which, there was a case in California where a judge ruled the Spanish were not Hispanic. And so now we have LatinX, which is being imported into UK academia despite the reality that our local Latins are French, Italian etc.