Women and Minorities

The joke goes like this. One day God gets fed up with the world and decides that he’s going to end the world and bring about the apocalypse. So, as a courtesy, he calls up the New York Times and tells them what he’s going to do. At first they don’t believe him, but he performs a few miracles and pretty soon they’re convinced they are talking to The Almighty. So the next morning the Times headline was “World to End Today! Women and Minorities to be Hit Hardest.”

Seriously, though, the term “Women and Minorities” is curious because of how the terms seem so intertwined while they are often at odds. Women, for instance, are a majority. They may only be a small one, but by being slightly more than 50%, they are the only group who can lay stake to that claim. Anyway, in yesterdays Wisconsin State Journal there was a story about the Madison Affirmative Action Commission and a study they released on the ethnic and gender make up of city managers. It was oh so typical of the position these kinds of commissions tend to take. It even had the obligatory misleading statistic to back up their findings. I could have told you their findings before reading a word, but sure enough the opening sentence stated that the city “should do more to hire and give equal pay to women and minority managers and top paid professionals...” Nothing surprising there. Later in the article they mention that “women and minority managers and top paid professionals make about 95% of the earnings of men or non-minorities...” (By the way, isn’t that worded in an odd manner? If you are not a woman, a man or a minority, what kind of “non-minority” could you be? Are they double counting white women when it suits there agenda? Are they counting minority men twice?) And they point out that the gap for agency heads is even bigger with the women and minorities only getting 86% as much as men.

But then they toss in the caveat that the “reports don’t factor individual seniority or level, or education into the formulas.” And my question would be, why not? Was that too difficult to do? I don’t think so. Aren’t those factors the most likely to have a dramatic effect on ones’ income in a bureaucracy? Of course they are. By leaving those factors out are you more likely come up with a report that says there is work to be done to close the gap? Obviously yes, unless it turned out that the women and minorities were the ones with the superior education or seniority level, in which case their argument would be even stronger. And that is exactly why I’m pretty sure that was not the case. They would not have missed that opportunity.

But the kicker came in the paragraphs that had the raw numbers:

“Just 34 percent of the city’s 429 top paid professionals are women and 10 percent are minorities, about the same as 2003, the report says.

Yet women represent 41 percent and minorities 8 percent of the available labor pool for those top positions, Dane County and state data show.”

That’s right, minorities are actually 25% over represented, and women are only 20% under represented. The differences are small I agree, and I’m not looking to get 2% of the minorities fired just to even things up. But don’t you think they could at least acknowledge that there isn’t a need to hire more to close a gap that isn’t there? Couldn’t you say we’re doing great on minorities but we have way to go on women? Why can’t these groups be separated since their circumstances are different?

The lefties are always so mind numbed in their quest to support women and minorities they can’t even recognize success. I remember a few years ago there was an article about a teacher at West High School who was something of a curmudgeon. He’d sit his van outside and smoke cigarettes while he graded papers. He complained about the lack of male teachers and thought it was not a good thing that one gender dominated the profession. When they went to the head of the DPI for a comment all she could come up with was that they were trying to hire more women and minorities.