Issue 84: The quota question
Is it affirmative action?
Why should boards have quotas for women? It doesn’t sit well with me.
That’s a diversity position. You know how those things go. Ha ha.
What about merit?
It’s a question that plagues a lot many of us very often. Reservation and merit.
Particularly in the context of jobs. And women.
When I was a doe-eyed twenty year-old, I carried strong views. About merit. Or my definition of merit. A very delusional version at that.
Aren’t we all the same, I would argue and bemoan, taking umbrage at the diversity “quota” hirings to bring more women into the corporate world.
It took a few years at the workplace to get my bearings right.
The women around me - peers, seniors, juniors - kept falling off and disappearing like flies swatted off the face of the Earth. They seemed to have much much more ‘issues’ than the average man.
And the corporate wheel kept turning undeterred, men filling up the positions as the pyramid moved up.
It hit me hardest when I became a hiring manager for the first time. There were simply no resumes of women to sift through, forget interviewing or offering roles to. I realised two things contribute to this -
Women keep dropping off at every level of their career, because of marriage, first child’s care, second child’s care, elder care etc etc. So, the overall pool of available women resumes is much smaller than men’s.
Women apply to roles only if they find a 100% match between their qualification and the JD vs men who apply with a 60% match, bringing the number of female resumes in the pool down further.
That brings us to the elephant in the room.
That’s all fine about women’s struggles, but does it mean men get the short end of the stick? I can sense the murmurs and mumbles, and horror of horrors, the unsubscribes (more about that some other day).
When we think diversity hiring, we end up falling into the trap that undeserved people will make it to the top. Anecdotes get extrapolated to line graphs, one-offs to norms, as we start quoting how “bad women” succeed.
In practicality, at a pre-mid to mid managerial level, a focus on diversity ensures there are more resumes of all kinds in the pool. And after that, in most cases, it is a fair fight to get in. And beyond that, it is a fairer fight to keep the job.
Are hiring mistakes a possibility? Yes, of course, to err is human. And when we err, it means someone deserving didn’t end up at the right place because someone not right got picked up. But that’s gonna happen irrespective of the hired candidate’s gender.
Perhaps, it is time to shift the frame with which we view diversity actions. Not personally, as if someone is taking away our hypothetical job. But, as justice, hard though that feels to digest sometimes.
P. S. Views strictly personal.