Not only that, but these arbitrary quotas are hugely damaging to the unusual, pioneering people who earned their positions the old fashioned way, through grit and talent, and hard work. It's unavoidable now that people will look at ALL unestablished women and minorities in stem and wonder whether or not they're just a diversity hire.
I was thinking about this the other day, how all these initiatives are not even about equality, let alone equity. They're about supremacy. They're about improving the status and power of given tribes. The groups who push for them use terms like diversity, inclusion, representation, and equality as propaganda, while in reality, they take actions that work towards the opposite of those things.
Why are they pushing so hard for women and minorities to get into stem specifically? Why not into other male dominated areas? Why aren't they pushing just as hard to get men and white people into industries dominated by women and minorities? Why can certain things be considered 'diverse', despite their being dominated by a single group, just so long as that group isn't straight, white or male?
We all know the answers to these questions, but in polite society we just amble around pretending like we don't, and then when these initiatives eventually come up short, everyone scratches their heads and pretends again like they can't figure out what went wrong.
The whole thing is so counterproductive, and ultimately pointless. In a free country, you can't force people to devote years of their lives to something they're just not interested in, not without offering insanely overvalued incentives. The moment the 'positive' discrimination and free rides end, the numbers revert back to what they were previously.
It's so stupid.