Are diversity quotas necessary?
Kayleigh Graham considers whether diversity quotas are necessary for firms, alongside the short and long term implications.
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All quotas require discrimination and all discrimination is bad, whether it's negative or supposedly positive. If it's good for one community, it's bad for another one and what the writer says about tokenism and resentment is absolutely right. You can't, in any event, ever specify that you're going to hire 12% BAME in your surveyors department if there aren't that number of BAME surveyors in the job market. Quotas may satisfy the left/liberals and look good in the annual report, but they don't work and are divisive not inclusive.
Quotas are subjective nonsense. Consider this; with a UK prison population of about 82000, 78000 are men and 4000 are women. Are there 74000 men who should not be in prison, or 74000 women who should be?
You then start to cherry-pick meritocracies. There are more than 3% of black professional footballers; does that mean that there has been discrimination? There are very few footballers of Chinese origin and hardly any Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi.
Finally, quotas are based on averages. There are some people who only have one leg or no legs at all. With an average leg ownership of 1.99999% (let's say), think how many people have a greater than average number of legs.
We are accountants and should understand this better than most people.
Can we have some gender quotas for bricklayers? Currently > 99% male.
#chickswholaybricks
I knew a lot of the comments would disagree with you, but I partly agree - I consider that the current system as is doesn't please everyone and is (directly or indirectly) discriminatory. Any change is still likely to inconvenience some groups and won't make everyone happy so why not try these approaches and see?
Whilst it is obvious that you should always recruit the best candidate for the job, deciding who is the best is a subjective process and the issues of prejudice and discrimination will inevitably come into play. I believe that quotas, applied sensibly, can help overcome this. The question is - how to apply them sensibly? The current figures for the UK population are 51% women, 3.3% BAME, 22% registered disabled. They will vary from area to area. If you choose relevant targets, that seems fair. If any 'quotas' are binding, that might cause more problems than it solves but if your current workforce is 20% women, 1% BAME and 2% disabled, for example, there are all sorts of targets you could aim for and use progress against those targets to set policy. It's not difficult. And of course, the bigger the organisation, the more representative it can be.