If you're all about diversity ...

[tobee]

are you not always excluding someone? So it not possible to be truly diverse ever?

Pretty sure I'm preaching to the choir here (😃) but I was thinking this a lot over the last few days. Since the furore over the apparent depiction of The Last Supper at the Olympics opening ceremony offending Christians and my thoughts meandering around lots of other things in and the news atm.

Basically, inclusion and diversity become oppositional. And yet it's the done thing to trumpet your inclusivity and diversity.

Or am I reading it wrong?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

I don't think it's group preference, but I do think a large part is the reality of the unequal load of parenting, rather than exclusively discrimination. It is no surprise to me that the women highest in my current company are either childless/child free or have a SAHP.

Companies want workers who will prioritise the job over everything else, and women are much less likely to have the freedom to do so. The job I mentioned above could easily have been a job share, I frequently worked 60+ hrs a week, but they wanted one person to work overtime, rather than 2 people working a standard week.

Headline gender numbers bolstered by women without children do nothing to remove barriers for the majority of women who have caring responsibilities. Incidentally, I left that job before having children because I knew I couldn't do it and still see my kids during the week.

Yes, I agree with this.
Unfortunately this view that "women choose it" and "most women prefer to stay at home" only enables companies to continue to get away with family unfriendly working practices.
Feels like we are going backwards on it to me TBH.

Two things are true:

1. Women choose to have children, choose to prioritise spending time with those children over their career. They also choose less well paid "nurturing" jobs. This leads to a gender pay gap - but it is women's CHOICE to work in less well paid jobs. They could do what men are doing if they have a problem with it.
2. There are not enough people choosing to do lower paid jobs, particularly the lower paid "nurturing" jobs leading to a recruitment crisis. Also, women are not having enough children - they are not choosing to deprioritize their own careers and earning potential enough. This is a crisis! And it is the fault of feminists for persuading women to act like men.

In reality - to have a healthy well balanced society you need to look at the way caring responsibilities and childbirth/childcare disadvantage women in terms of earning potential or career progression. And look at ways of addressing that imbalance - because either it ends with women being hugely disadvantaged (not fair on an individual level) or it ends with less people choosing to do important but lower paid/status work (bad for society). Instead people go round and round claiming women should choose differently and then panicking when they do.

I don’t think feminism has to = men and women are exactly the same. It’s not anti-feminist at all to say that men and women may have different priorities. It would only be anti-feminist if we then said women’s priorities were less important/valuable than men’s.

But it is empirically true that most women want to be mothers and most mothers want to work part time.

Most people want to be parents.
Most mothers are forced to work PT due to the fact work is set up for dad's

It's anti feminist to claim the reason women are less well represented in various spheres of life is because of "gendered choices".

This is really feminism 101 and I'm not sure I'm inclined to explain it

Women choose to have children, choose to prioritise spending time with those children over their career. They also choose less well paid "nurturing" jobs. This leads to a gender pay gap - but it is women's CHOICE to work in less well paid jobs. They could do what men are doing if they have a problem with

This is not true. The gender pay gap happens across industries and jobs.

There are not enough people choosing to do lower paid jobs, particularly the lower paid "nurturing" jobs leading to a recruitment crisis. Also, women are not having enough children - they are not choosing to deprioritize their own careers and earning potential enough. This is a crisis! And it is the fault of feminists for persuading women to act like men.

This is also not true. The world is over populated. Women keep being told not to have babies they can't afford/not to have them with the "wrong man". Not having children is a rational choice.

@CassieMaddox Sorry - I was being a bit sarcastic! Its just that the same people claiming the gender pay gap is purely down to personal choice are also worried when women don't make that choice (cough Jordon Peterson cough). I think the pay gap is complicated - it doesn't just happen because of babies/children but they are a big part of it. If you want to tackle it you have to look at how having children disproportionally affects women and find ways to mitigate that. And I agree we are overpopulated, but if no-one had children or did the less well paid jobs we would be screwed. But not having children is the rational choice for women as things stand.

The idea that men and women overall will make the same choices is totally a faith position. There is little evidence for it - in fact where they have the most choices, women and men tend to choose differently more often.

To say that it's a required belief for feminism is to make feminism into a set of quasi-religious dogma.

Which it seems to be for some, but those people should not be surprised when people see feminism as a religion they have no interest in rather than a compelling justice movement.

Curious to know your age bracket @OodleDoodleTwonk.
This is a debate within feminism that has been going on decades.
Last big flare up I remember was around the publication of Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In.

I began a Dip Ed in 2000 and was horrified when I learned the numbers of kids who finish their schooling with a reading age of 7 or less. The vast majority of these kids are boys.
I was surprised to find most people I spoke to about it, and my circles were completely social justice, left wing types, just weren't very interested.

I don’t know, I run a business and have what you might call ‘unfriendly work practices’ because the job requires it if is not going to fail. Many jobs require full time hours unfortunately.

But if you look at survey data most mothers want to work part time. I’m sure some are forced by circumstances but for a majority it is a preference.

The way you ‘set up work’ for mothers is by making part time possible. Not by forcing them into intense, full-time work and providing 24/7 childcare. Most mothers don’t want this.

My dh works in a street cleaning dept where 3 out of over 2000 manual workers are women. These 3 women were given internal clerical jobs ahead of any of the men who had much more experience and knowledge of the job. Now these women have zero respect from the men because of the way they were handed the (cushy non street sweeping) jobs.

Yes. And that will only happen when part time becomes the default preference for everyone. Talking about it as a preference for "mothers" provides the perfect excuse for it not happening. It just means mothers won't have access to the highest value jobs, as they "need someone full time"