"If you have more women engineers on a team, they tend to bring more diverse opinions, but they also tend to build a collaborative culture. And a result, things get done faster. They’re more organized. There’s more empathy, which makes for a better work environment. It’s just better all around."
If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.
It's shocking that so many people fighting the good fight for the equality of women in the workforce also attribute special qualities to women that men just don't have - the common ones being that they're more organized, and can more easily think outside the box.
This is sexist, counterproductive, and false.
Women should be represented in a profession because they're fungible with men and make up half of the general population.
Period.
Once you start saying a team needs women, because they have some special insight or ability, you have to logically accept that a team that is 100% women is not as good as that same team plus a man - which is simply not true.
Most certainly, however you can't say whether that that impact produces a more equal or more unequal ratio.
Citing a racial example, the greater equality (read: more meritocratic) of admissions practiced by CalTech results in a disproportionately Asian composition (~40% Asian whereas Asians are just 4.4% of the population and only like 2% of the students are African American, which African Americans are make up like 17% of the US population.
The usual use sense in which the genders are claimed to be equal is more about being worthy of equal treatment than about being strictly equivalent (the latter of which is self-evidently false).
Hence seeking to hire females/women "cause diversity" is pretty demeaning. And sex/gender is a pretty poor way to introduce diversity in the first place. You want to seek out people that have vastly different experiences and/or personalities.
You're being downvoted heavily but I actually agree with you - diversity shouldn't be pigeonholed into just physical diversity. Diversity for the sake of diversity smells funny to me too but it's also near impossible to know when you need diversity for the injection of different points of view.
Worse yet, in such "cause diversity" workplaces, those females that are hired because they as good if not better than the men get hurt by this mentality because it creates an environment where the men question the legitimacy of their female colleagues.
Not really, since "equal" is poorly defined. A blue shirt and red shirt are equally nice, but a closet of assorted shirts is more valuable than a closet of just blue shirts.
A portfolio of diverse stocks, each with an equal risk/reward profile, has equal reward to an individual stock but far lower risk.
That doesn't mean that I should aim for an even blend of the various things though: in the case of your investment example, it makes sense to preferentially select for certain kinds of financial instruments and only have a minority portion of others, because that's where I get optimum contribution from their respective traits.
I think the phrase that deserves a lot of consideration is "better work environment."
To me, the question isn't about whether men and women are equals in the workplace. The question is whether the workplace provides an equal opportunity for men, women, and people with diverse backgrounds to succeed.
Anyone can miss quote someone this was a comment about education, and how boys cannot be taught in the same way as girls, evident in the declining academic outcomes for small boys.
He attacked what you were saying, calling it a ridiculous reductive perspective, and then attacked you. Would you reject the idea that you perspective was reductive, even ridiculously so?
If the genders are equal any combination of them are also equal.