OPINION • Aug 06, 2020
Injustice to boys??
A few months back a Big Fortune 100 company came to our college for campus placement. I don’t want to name them, to avoid all sorts of consequences, but let me say this, they are a Construction, Mining, and Utility vehicle manufacturer. It is the highest paying mechanical engineering job offer of the year and everyone was eager. Their selection procedure was also one of the most elaborate. Some of my boys reached the final round. But little did we know about what was actually going on. The entire recruitment process was a SHAM and our boys who worked hard to reach the final round reached for nothing. The company was in our college to improve their “men to women ratio” and “women representation rating “in their company. They recruited 3 out of the 5 girls who are in the entirety of the mechanical branches (Mech, Auto, Prod) of a total strength of 200. I was like “What the F**K?” Absolutely furious, even though I wasn’t directly affected. Because our boys who went to final rounds with the hope that there was at least a small chance they would be selected, but they were there just used as props to give those girls the feeling that they actually got into the company on merit. If you are going to tell me otherwise, please don’t. It is statistically not probable (because of the sample size) and more than that I know what my boys are capable of. Please don’t hate, I am no misogynist. Read what I got to say.
There is a good chance that everyone reading this would be either a beneficiary or a loser because of reservations like this. Reservations are everywhere. A friend of mine had the opportunity to join the same college course as me despite having a 15-point deficit in cut off. IIMs in their interview rubric adds 5 extra points out of 100 if the interviewee was a woman for gender diversity- It is significant and decisive, considering the competition. It is in Govt jobs explicitly and implicitly in Corporate jobs. Even Harvard Business School admits 43% of people (of their the US admits) who are an ethnic minority when the demographic representation suggests that ethnic minorities contribute to just over 20% of the total population. Reservation is practically everywhere in India- Mainly for Gender, Caste, and even Nativity.
But is Hatred the right emotion when talking about reservations? Until recently I thought so. But now I know, it is not. I would like to believe that in India, people don’t show hate for providing everyone with equal opportunities. But no one is willing to accept the reservations, because it is not providing equal opportunities for everyone. But I want to prove otherwise. Reservation is giving equal opportunities for everyone.
I have always known it, so you do too.
முதல் கோணல் முற்றுங் கோணல் (Mudhal Konal Mutrung Konal)
But don’t interpret conventionally.
I presume you might have heard that if a huge asteroid is about a year out from hitting the earth, all you need to do is to move it about a few millimeters from its existing trajectory. What I am trying to make out of this here is that a small disadvantage, in the beginning, can make way to huge disparities with time.
I have already talked about the disparities happening in India because of one’s skin color in the colorism article. But I found a more interesting case for this. I guess some of you might have heard about the GRE. It is a Graduate school admission standardized test. The thing about this test is that it is statistically proven and however many you write you will get predictable and repeatable scores. What I am trying to say is that it is an extremely fair, equitable a and proven testing system for measuring one's cognitive, quantitative, logical, and verbal skills (Except for the high testing cost) unlike the stupidly difficult and unrepresentative tests in India. I took the test recently and I was going through some data (It is open source, I have attached a link). Men have a healthy 5-point difference over women in quantitative scores and around the same scores in the verbal section (in mean). The standard deviation for men is also higher than that of women. And a 5 point in a 130 to 170-point scale is very very significant and decisive (Basically, it is a 40-point scale and 5 points in 40 is very big chunk) and the lower standard deviation suggests lesser women are getting very high scores (and very low scores). But, please don’t think the first thing which probably comes to your mind. It is not true and there is no empirical proof for that.
As I said earlier the small disadvantage, in the beginning, causes big disparities in the end. This is one of those cases. There are a lot of possible causes for it like the underrepresentation in International women (The test is American), etc but the more significant factor that I found is the expectation on children. What is common here is also common worldwide. Boys are expected to score well in science and math than girls. This small implicit force is what has resulted in this kind of disparity. You might have experienced it too. For example, I was bought Hot wheels and books and puzzles as a kid, whereas my sister was bought silly barbies and dolls to play with. My parents are not sexist by any measure, but these small implicit expectations on a kid are unmistakable.
The same sort of GRE score differences exists between whites, blacks, and Asians. You can go through the data and find significant differences everywhere.
What I am trying to imply here is that a large part of who you are today is because of luck- think about it deeply, you will appreciate this fact more and more. Either by birth or nurture or gender or caste or skin color or economic status. What reservations are trying to accomplish is trying to take that luck you had out of the equation to make the opportunities more equitable and evaluate you for who you are without that luck. The word “reservations” also sends out the wrong signals. A better word will be “reparations”. It means making amends for the wrongs or in this case disadvantages that have been endowed on certain people.
No one will be ready to accept this with joy and no one needs to be that good. Nonetheless, we have to accept it until an equitable society is achieved. Hatred is not the right emotion, acceptance it is. The most disadvantages here are the “OC” boys and I do feel bad for them, but they are born in the wrong decade. The system we have right now is not perfect. while it is perfectly possible to design a better system to mitigate the public resentment and make it fair for all parties concerned. Having something is better than nothing.
But whatever, what that company did to my friends was despicable and deceptive and deserving of all the pejoratives. There are a lot of better and more civil ways to do it.
This is a video I would recommend everyone to watch.
It can be interpreted for all inequalities and not just the racial wealth gap
GRE Interpretative Data snapshot
https://www.ets.org/gre/snapshot