Discrimination charges based on under-representation

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If some minority group (such as blacks) represents, say, 10% of the population of a country and an employer’s work force contains less than that percentage, the company is then assumed to be discriminating against that group. In other words, if the number hired is less than would be hired if one did a random pick from the population, then discrimination is assumed.

This is an assumption that liberals like to make.

Is this assumption valid? Are there no reasons other than discrimination why the number of that minority hired might be less than their percentage in the population?

When hiring someone there are certain constraints restricting who you can hire — like a person’s age, educational qualifications, physical size and strength, work experience, etc — which may reduce the size of the pool of eligible people considerably. After all restrictions have been applied and many people eliminated, the size of the pool you are selecting from may be much smaller than the original one and the ratio to the total population much different. If 80% of the minority group is so badly educated that they can’t do basic arithmetic that may eliminate 80% of the group if being good with arithmetic is a requirement.

Liberals like to assume that people are all homogeneous and interchangeable. That is just a very bad assumption. People are not homogeneous. Everyone is different, unique and special. And people fall into groups with their own distinctive characteristics. Germans are different than the Latins. Japanese are different than Americans. Different cultures have their own cultural stamps. Some cultures are very industrious and hardworking. Others not. Etc.

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Compassion Versus Guilt. pp. 149 - 151

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The Sears Case

Sears Roebuck was one of the first big companies to have "affirmative action" plans, nearly 20 years ago, to try to add to the number of its minority and female employees. As a result, they were also one of the first to be sued by the government for discrimination, using the very statistics that Sears had collected to help monitor its own efforts to recruit women and minorities.

This was by no means the first time that those who tried to do the right thing were singled out as targets, just because it was easier to make a case against them. The government's case against Sears was based on statistical "under-representation" of women among Sears' commission salesmen, who sell such items as furnaces, roofing, fences, automobile tires, and men's clothing. Time was when common sense would have told you that many women were unlikely to gamble their livelihoods on making commissions selling such items. But common sense doesn't carry much weight, now that we have statistics.

Many judges accept statistics so gullibly that it is possible for the government to prosecute a discrimination case without a single human being who claims that he or she was personally discriminated against. That is virtually what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission did in the Sears case. But this time they ran into a judge who couldn't be snowed with numbers.

Judge John A. Nordberg pointed out in his recent decision that, with eight years of voluminous evidence on a company with over 900 stores, the EEOC was "unable to produce even one witness who could credibly testify that Sears discriminated against her."

The judge ruled in favor of Sears. His decision included a lengthy and penetrating discussion of statistical analysis and its pitfalls, which should be required reading for other judges, Congressmen, and media deep thinkers.

If it was a farce for the EEOC to have brought this case in the first place, the outraged responses to the decision were a bigger farce. Women's liberation "spokespersons" denounced it as a setback for equal rights. The American Civil Liberties Union protested. All the usual liberal editorial writers said all the usual liberal things.

At the heart of the controversy is the grand dogma of our times—that people would be evenly distributed everywhere, if it were not for institutional barriers. No speck of evidence has ever been advanced for this sweeping assumption. Dogmas don't need evidence.

The cold fact is that almost nobody is evenly distributed anywhere or ever has been—whether in the United States or abroad, in this century or in past centuries. Anyone who watches basketball must know that there is an uneven distribution there that makes other uneven distributions look like nothing. Yet blacks have no power to discriminate against whites in basketball. Back in the days of the Roman Empire, 10,000 Britons were killed in a battle with the Roman legion—who lost less than 500 men. That's what the lawyers call "disparate impact," but it is not clear who could be charged with discrimination.

Nowhere do people have the same preferences, behavior, or performance. Italian immigrants and their descendants have not been evenly distributed, even in Italian neighborhoods. Whether in Buenos Aires, Boston, or New York, people who originated in the same parts of Italy have tended to cluster together on the same streets overseas. Among people of Japanese ancestry in Brazil, most of those originating in Okinawa marry other Okinawans—not people from Tokyo, much less members of the Brazilian population at random.

Neither military forces nor college students are random. Most of the sergeants in the Soviet army are Ukrainians. When Nigeria became independent, the bulk of the enlisted men in its army came from northern tribes, while the bulk of its officers came from southern tribes. Hispanic American college students do not choose the same mixture of subjects to major in as Asian Americans, and the Asians in turn do not choose the same subjects as whites, or whites the same subjects as blacks.

You could fill volumes with similar examples from all over the world and throughout history. Some differences are striking to the eye because the people are of different color or sex. But even where they are physically indistinguishable, the differences are enormous.

Where did we get the idea that people are homogeneous, and therefore could be expected to be evenly distributed? From intellectuals. Anybody else would have too much common sense.

---February 14, 1986

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29 May 2024