The WOKE Thread (Merged from WTF?)

[Guardian]

I don’t equate an analogy on degrees to arguments of racism. So I kinda see what you are saying. But having someone get or not get a degree is largely a choice or an intentional decision. Skin or sex isn’t. And discriminating based on skin color or sex is racist.

Advanced degrees don’t equate, rgardless of if I want the master masked or not.

[jazzdude]

I don’t equate an analogy on degrees to arguments of racism. So I kinda see what you are saying. But having someone get or not get a degree is largely a choice or an intentional decision. Skin or sex isn’t. And discriminating based on skin color or sex is racist.

Advanced degrees don’t equate, rgardless of if I want the master masked or not.

That is the point. A system that encourages one outcome (in the example, further education) can have negative unintended impacts elsewhere. In the degree example, an individual can change to adapt to the system. This becomes a bigger problem when the decision is something an individual cannot control (race, sex).

The goal is to remove any biases in the system that may hinder (or give extra advantage to) any particular group, do that it truly is about an individual's abilities, and their race/sex doesn't influence their outcome.

[Guardian]

Gotcha. Where, other than affirmative action, are the racist or sexist biases that keep minorities or women down? It’s been a federal offense for a very long time to discriminate against race or sex.

You point to an analogy but I see no evidence that a woman is kept down or a black man is kept down. There are many instances of a woman or minority being hired to try and achieve equality of outcome and discriminate against males or a majority skin color. So I ask. Isn’t that racism? Isn’t that systematic racism?

Isn’t pushing one minority or gender ahead of another what we have been fighting against since the 50/60’s?

[slackline]

That is the point. A system that encourages one outcome (in the example, further education) can have negative unintended impacts elsewhere. In the degree example, an individual can change to adapt to the system. This becomes a bigger problem when the decision is something an individual cannot control (race, sex).

The goal is to remove any biases in the system that may hinder (or give extra advantage to) any particular group, do that it truly is about an individual's abilities, and their race/sex doesn't influence their outcome.

This was the equivalent of me asking you to show me a dog, you pointing to a dog and saying, "that's a dog" then me saying, "ok, I see what you're saying, but I don't see any dogs, can you show me an actual dog?"

Except, in this scenario you gave an example of how the system can hurt certain people, and Guardian said, "ok, but I don't see how that hurts certain people. Can you show me yet another example I will disregard?"

Just don't respond anymore. He'll ignore the facts and then say you're the one ignoring the facts.

Give it about 5', he'll be on here saying I'm projecting, or to put it on his level, "I'm rubber you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you..."


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[Guardian]

Emotion.... hurt feelings...lack of discussion...lack of facts. Predictable.

Don’t worry LT. Unless you get a DUI you will get promoted to captain. Just keep your head down and keep your nose clean.

[slackline]

Emotion.... hurt feelings...lack of discussion...lack of facts. Predictable.

Don’t worry LT. Unless you get a DUI you will get promoted to captain. Just keep your head down and keep your nose clean.

My time was off, but dang, I nailed it,


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Guardian]

I don’t know what “IT”is but hopefully “it” doesn’t reproduce.

Edit for just slackline since everyone else gets the above. That was literal sarcasm.

[ViperMan]

6 hours ago, jazzdude said:

A lot of the actual effort isn't pushing one group over another, but rather removing barriers/drag placed on particular groups that may have been put there unintentionally or have unintended effects. Whether it's outdated policies or standards, or reassessing requirements-things change, and the system we all live and work with has to change to stay current.

How about an analogy that contains what some would consider some heresy on this board?

Maybe advanced degrees should be unmasked from all promotion boards, at it helps paint a picture of how well rounded a person is.

...

The downside is this came with several unintended consequences. People saw the correlation that having a master's improved your promotion chances, and started getting a check the box masters using TA, that didn't actually improve them in any appreciable manner. This meant the AF didn't really get someone who really learned anything in the addition education, and had to several thousands of dollars for pretty much every officer to check a box that became diluted.

Lots of pilots in this board complained that while they were hacking the mish on 12+ hour days, our FSS counterparts were getting plenty of time to do there master's coursework. We (pilots) complained that this de facto requirement was unfair, and that our skills and job specific training brought value to the AF when considering promotions.

...

That kind of examination on requirements/standards is what a lot of the recent diversity push have been about: re-examining what we do, how we do it, and went we do it, and the effects of the rules we put in place, to try and create a fair environment for everyone in the service (fair as in race/gender do not influence outcomes, just your abilities).

Your line of argument, applied to this situation, would've doubled down on the keeping degrees unmasked for promotions. Unmasked degrees were the standard and advanced education is valued, and this is fair since everyone knew it was considered in promotions, has access to TA to pay for it, and since the big AF values it, your supervisor should give you time to work on it on duty; you just need to manage your time better and suck less, and quit complaining about how the system is unfair.

Dude, instead of using master's degrees as a proxy for some standard that was fair or unfair and how changing it either led to the betterment or detriment of the said groups, why don't we just get specific on the topic at hand? What, exactly, are the systemic barriers that are in place that prevent X-type of person from joining the AF and achieving a successful career? Personally, I don't think there are any. I think arguing by analogy in cases like these leads us literally nowhere. Get specific.

On the topic of master's degrees, however, using them in order to determine whether or not someone should be chosen for advancement really only came to pass because it was a way for the promotion board to hit the easy button when they're examining a stack of (basically) equivalent OPRs. Let's be completely honest: we have developed and placed a lot of faith in metrics that we convince ourselves (i.e. promotion boards convince themselves) accurately measure whether or not someone should be promoted. In actuality, however, these ridiculous processes exist merely as ritual to legitimize a purely subjective process. This bullet means X, this bullet means Y. It would be better (more objective) - it really would be - if your OPR was merely a rank ordered 1, 2, 3, ..., n,  out of N, and what got sent up to the promotion board was a list of the rankings you achieved over your career along with a recommendation of whether or not you should promote. The promotion board would literally be purely objective, and we'd be able to side-step the little temporary, subjective universe that gets created during the promotion board card game.

And finally, I will proceed to flog myself for the overuse of the word 'master' in this post - it has recently been decreed that this word is decidedly 'unwoke' and its use is somehow discriminatory, triggering, inflammatory, and/or otherwise offensive to certain groups of people. My bad, tonight I'll go to sleep in my primary bedroom.

Edited November 9, 2020 by ViperMan

[jazzdude]

Gotcha. Where, other than affirmative action, are the racist or sexist biases that keep minorities or women down? It’s been a federal offense for a very long time to discriminate against race or sex.

You point to an analogy but I see no evidence that a woman is kept down or a black man is kept down. There are many instances of a woman or minority being hired to try and achieve equality of outcome and discriminate against males or a majority skin color. So I ask. Isn’t that racism? Isn’t that systematic racism?

Isn’t pushing one minority or gender ahead of another what we have been fighting against since the 50/60’s?

Large portions of women do not meet the old height/antho standards that haven't been updated since something like the the 50s. Jets were built around what the 5-95 percentile male heights way back when the standard was established. We've since allowed women to fly military aircraft, and then combat aircraft, but never updated the height standards for aircraft. And the distribution of heights for women average shorter than men. So a good portion of women are ineligible to be air force pilots solely because of their height and because no one updated the standard until this year.

Its an unintentionally incomplete standard that was never updated because no one really saw a problem, until more women raised the concern. Updating the standard (happening this year) will allow future aircraft to be designed and built around what a majority of our population would be able to operate (to include guys as well, as we've gotten taller as a population), and increase the eligible recruiting pool for pilots (so we can get the best, and not just the best of those that are tall enough).

This is not than just a pilot job issue for women- traditionally the air force has favored pilots in the promotion system, especially in the senior ranks. The filter at the very front of the system (anthro standards to start UPT), makes it more challenging for women to promote to senior ranks.

It's not sexism in the sense that many of us think of (and I like to believe that most of that overt sexism has been stamped out), but it's an issue that creates a barrier for an otherwise qualified woman to advance in their military career.

[Guardian]

Wow. Never thought about aircraft design in women vs men. Very interesting. Has it caused some someone not to be able to serve and have they legit never looked back into it?

As for front line or strength required jobs? The line should be the line.

As for pilots being in charge of the AF, I’m not sure anyone but aircrew should be in charge of the air service overall. I’m not aware of a counter argument to that.

Thanks for the discourse

[jazzdude]

Dude, instead of using master's degrees as a proxy for some standard that was fair or unfair and how changing it either led to the betterment or detriment of the said groups, why don't we just get specific on the topic at hand? What, exactly, are the systemic barriers that are in place that prevent X-type of person from joining the AF and achieving a successful career? Personally, I don't think there are any. I think arguing by analogy in cases like these leads us literally nowhere. Get specific.

Education was used as an analogy to get away from preconceived arguments about race/sex and how that might affect career outcomes, and to use an example that most of us here have direct experience with to have a relatable discussion about a standard that was considered unfair by many in ops.

Want specific areas for race/sex? Here's some for starters.

- Just posted about anthro standards and how it effects women.

- Posted earlier about how requiring photos in hiring applications (for jobs that accelerate a career) can lead to biased selection, based on the army's experiment examining what happens if you remove photos in a selection process and how that affects minorites (it improves outcomes for minorities when there was no photo-arguably more focused on abilities and performance when photos were excluded).

- Mentorship. How many times have people here complained about "like promoting like?" If senior leaders have a personal bias for/against a particular group that shouldn't be considered (like race or sex), it tilts the outcomes for that group. It doesn't have to be anything sinister either, just a small, maybe unconscious, bias towards spending time with one demographic vs another. (They aren't necessarily bad people for having unintentional biases, we're all human and have them. But recognizing it's a thing can help you guard against it for the health/fairness of the overall system) And making O-6+, you typically will need a senior sponsor to watch your career and pull you up.

- Military justice.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/06/10/air-force-launches-review-racial-disparities-punishments-opportunities.html
https://www.stripes.com/news/air-force/air-force-fails-to-deal-with-racial-disparities-in-military-justice-report-says-1.631314
Those articles show that minority males tend to investigated more than white members of either sex. It does point out convictions are roughly equal, so the end outcome would appear to be fair (minorities no convicted at a higher rate than average). But on the other hand, when someone is accused, generally their career comes to a halt- they lose training spots, removed from primary duty, potential isolated from the unit/friends. Even if they are cleared if wrongdoing in court martial, that's still several months missing from their performance report, and their commander could still write a weak report (that's not referral) on them if they don't agree with the court martial outcome (absence of a strat, leaving out a push, weak language, etc) or delay/remove other future opportunities such as training or upgrades. More minority men have to deal with that than the overall average.

Many of these issue are hard to see as individuals, which makes it easy to say there are no issues because we don't see them. And I don't fault anyone for saying that they haven't seen anything on their day to day. That's great. But as information is aggregated up for our organization as a whole, there's a trend that shows that it's worth investigating and getting after a root cause fix (posted a link from DoD earlier showing minorities in the AF promote at a lower rate as rank increases as compared to the majority).

These are all issues that DoD is investigating/addressing in its recent diversity campaign.

[Prozac]

A good example along the same lines from the book Freakanomics:
https://slate.com/business/2005/04/a-roshanda-by-any-other-name.html

TLDR: “Steve” has a better chance at success than “D’Shaun” for myriad complex reasons. 

[jazzdude]

Wow. Never thought about aircraft design in women vs men. Very interesting. Has it caused some someone not to be able to serve and have they legit never looked back into it?

As for front line or strength required jobs? The line should be the line.

As for pilots being in charge of the AF, I’m not sure anyone but aircrew should be in charge of the air service overall. I’m not aware of a counter argument to that.

Thanks for the discourse

Maybe@stuckindayton could weigh in, but I don't think under height waivers were very common until recently (primarily to enable more women to be eligible to be pilots). So there was no real reattack COA for them. And if you joined to fly, and get told "no" due to something about yourself you can't change (or for whatever reason at all for that matter), chances are you'll min run any commitment incurred and punch. We don't really do exit surveys, so it's just an assumption.

Agree on the other two points.

However, standards/requirements should be revaluated regularly (could be a every few or more years, whatever makes sense for that standard), and the facts and assumptions included in those standards need to be revaluated regularly as well. Not just for diversity stuff specifically, but in general as a best practice to ensure we are best prepared to defend our country.

[ViperMan]

2 hours ago, jazzdude said:

Education was used as an analogy to get away from preconceived arguments about race/sex and how that might affect career outcomes, and to use an example that most of us here have direct experience with to have a relatable discussion about a standard that was considered unfair by many in ops.

Want specific areas for race/sex? Here's some for starters.

- Just posted about anthro standards and how it effects women.

- Posted earlier about how requiring photos in hiring applications (for jobs that accelerate a career) can lead to biased selection, based on the army's experiment examining what happens if you remove photos in a selection process and how that affects minorites (it improves outcomes for minorities when there was no photo-arguably more focused on abilities and performance when photos were excluded).

- Mentorship. How many times have people here complained about "like promoting like?" If senior leaders have a personal bias for/against a particular group that shouldn't be considered (like race or sex), it tilts the outcomes for that group. It doesn't have to be anything sinister either, just a small, maybe unconscious, bias towards spending time with one demographic vs another. (They aren't necessarily bad people for having unintentional biases, we're all human and have them. But recognizing it's a thing can help you guard against it for the health/fairness of the overall system) And making O-6+, you typically will need a senior sponsor to watch your career and pull you up.

- Military justice.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2020/06/10/air-force-launches-review-racial-disparities-punishments-opportunities.html
https://www.stripes.com/news/air-force/air-force-fails-to-deal-with-racial-disparities-in-military-justice-report-says-1.631314
Those articles show that minority males tend to investigated more than white members of either sex. It does point out convictions are roughly equal, so the end outcome would appear to be fair (minorities no convicted at a higher rate than average). But on the other hand, when someone is accused, generally their career comes to a halt- they lose training spots, removed from primary duty, potential isolated from the unit/friends. Even if they are cleared if wrongdoing in court martial, that's still several months missing from their performance report, and their commander could still write a weak report (that's not referral) on them if they don't agree with the court martial outcome (absence of a strat, leaving out a push, weak language, etc) or delay/remove other future opportunities such as training or upgrades. More minority men have to deal with that than the overall average.

Many of these issue are hard to see as individuals, which makes it easy to say there are no issues because we don't see them. And I don't fault anyone for saying that they haven't seen anything on their day to day. That's great. But as information is aggregated up for our organization as a whole, there's a trend that shows that it's worth investigating and getting after a root cause fix (posted a link from DoD earlier showing minorities in the AF promote at a lower rate as rank increases as compared to the majority).

These are all issues that DoD is investigating/addressing in its recent diversity campaign.

 

Anthropological standards appears to be fair game, and would be if there was a 50/50 split in who serves in the military, but there isn't. Once we have 50 women fighter pilots for 50 male fighter pilots, then we can talk. That said, I've been in about 5 fighter squadrons over my career and there have been 3 women in them and about 200 men. It ain't some intentional conspiracy as to why ejection seats, etc, were developed for men. All through history, men have been the ones to go to war. Men have been the ones flying fighter aircraft. It was male test subjects volunteering to strap themselves to rocket sleds and test those first ejection seats. Women fulfilling combat roles is brand new. Hence, standards that were implemented reflected the underlying reality that it was men who were going to be the ones flying these airplanes - not that women were being systematically excluded from this opportunity. That said, I agree with you in principle that this is an area that can be adjusted, at present, to make things more "fair" but it doesn't meet the definition of systemic discrimination against a group (women). Discrimination is a conscious determination by an individual that they are going to produce favor for one person to the detriment of another based on the characteristic(s) at hand.

On the topic of photos, I agree with you 100%. There is no reason why a photo (or any racial/sex data) should be included as part of a promotion package. In fact, names should probably also be masked so that there is nothing that can be read into when decisions are being made as to who should be promoted. As far as promotion boards are concerned, it is only performance data that is relevant. And more importantly when we implement this little "social" betterment, there is no cost imposed on anyone else - which is not the case with many other social justice initiatives, but should be a necessary condition for any of them to be implemented.

As far as mentorship goes, I'm not sure how identifying a generic problem that affects all people somehow disproportionately affects a minority. It's a general problem and sure, one we should be aware of, but it's also taken for granted that it is having a measurable effect on the development and selection of "under" represented people, else, it'd be easy to provide actual examples. But such is the problem with "unconscious" biases; we have to rely on professionals who have received knowledge, and they're the perfect scapegoat for those who want to implement social programs, provide no hard evidence, and then implement whatever program they want. It's an example of the false premise fallacy - you have a valid argument, but one that is demonstrably false. It's precisely why arguments like this are so hard for people to see through. And the danger is that once you give people who have special received wisdom power, you now have a religion.

On to military justice, there is one major problem with those articles - they are missing the broader, underlying context. From the stripes article:

Quote

In 2017, the group published a report that found racial inequalities across the military justice system, with the Air Force cited as having some of the most extreme discrepancies. In the Air Force, black airmen on average were 71% more likely to face court-martial or nonjudicial punishment than their white counterparts, according to the group’s investigation at the time.

The unstated assumption in this article is that there should be no inequalities between blacks and whites. That's great, and is an ideal that reflects the desired society which we all hope is someday realized, but it is just not the present reality we live in. I'm sorry. No, the proper framing of the disparity needs to be couched in terms of the broader societal context that we find ourselves a smaller part of. In that reality, blacks commit a grossly disproportionate share of crime (https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2 and https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21 and https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime). The reasons for this we can get to in another thread, but within the context of the articles you provided, the proper question to ask is this: is it surprising that given blacks commit a higher proportion of crime in the broader society, that they also commit a higher proportion of crime within the Air Force? I don't think it is. So good job stars and stripes, you figured out something we already knew. It would be strange had they not found blacks are investigated 71% more than whites.

I agree that it's hard to see many of these issues as individuals, but it is also very easy to take an interested party's shallow analysis and take their conclusions as gospel without asking harder questions, or doing your own homework. Let's not lose sight of the forest for the trees.

Edited November 9, 2020 by ViperMan

[Prozac]

24 minutes ago, ViperMan said:

In that reality, blacks commit a grossly disproportionate share of crime (https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/crime/ucr.asp?table_in=2 and https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2016/crime-in-the-u.s.-2016/topic-pages/tables/table-21 and https://www.channel4.com/news/factcheck/factcheck-black-americans-commit-crime). The reasons for this we can get to in another thread, but within the context of the articles you provided, the proper question to ask is this: is it surprising that given blacks commit a higher proportion of crime in the broader society, that they also commit a higher proportion of crime within the Air Force? I don't think it is.

Please do tell us why you think black Americans are more likely to commit criminal acts than their white counterparts. This is absolutely pertinent to the current conversation. 

[ViperMan]

1 minute ago, Prozac said:

Please do tell us why you think black Americans are more likely to commit criminal acts than their white counterparts. This is absolutely pertinent to the current conversation. 

I didn't say I think blacks are more likely to commit crime than whites - I said the data says they do. Blacks DO commit more crime than whites. My thoughts have NOTHING to do with that, and shouldn't have anything to do with it. It's not about your or my thoughts.

The "why" of all this is not up to the Air Force, which is my more pertinent point. We're an organization of about 300,000 people, which is about 1/1000th of the American populace, we're not going to solve the social ills that are part of the larger context we find ourselves in.

[Prozac]

41 minutes ago, ViperMan said:

I didn't say I think blacks are more likely to commit crime than whites - I said the data says they do. Blacks DO commit more crime than whites. My thoughts have NOTHING to do with that, and shouldn't have anything to do with it. It's not about your or my thoughts.

The "why" of all this is not up to the Air Force, which is my more pertinent point. We're an organization of about 300,000 people, which is about 1/1000th of the American populace, we're not going to solve the social ills that are part of the larger context we find ourselves in.

So here’s an alternate take on the subject: Blacks, along with other minorities are routinely prosecuted for crimes that whites are not. It’s kind of a chicken/egg argument, like your argument that fighters are designed for men because men have been the ones to step up to the task. It’s not that women weren’t up to the task, it’s that they were prohibited from it for a multitude of reasons, one of them being they don’t fit into cockpits. I honestly do not mean to insinuate that you or anyone else is being sexist or racist. I just think some of us need a little light shed on the fact that these issues are far more complex and nuanced than they often appear on the surface, and will require real study to overcome. 

[ViperMan]

7 minutes ago, Prozac said:

So here’s an alternate take on the subject: Blacks, along with other minorities are routinely prosecuted for crimes that whites are not. It’s kind of a chicken/egg argument, like your argument that fighters are designed for men because men have been the ones to step up to the task. It’s not that women weren’t up to the task, it’s that they were prohibited from it for a multitude of reasons, one of them being they don’t fit into cockpits. I honestly do not mean to insinuate that you or anyone else is being sexist or racist. I just think some of us need a little light shed on the fact that these issues are far more complex and nuanced than they often appear on the surface, and will require real study to overcome. 

Completely agree that they're complex issues that require study, and I know everyone here is actually concerned about solving these problems, it's more just a disagreement about what the core problem is, and what the solution should be.

I think that when there is such vehement disagreement on what the problem is and what the solutions are, doing something contentious is very risky. Any solution we implement will absolutely require broad (bipartisan) buy in. And actual, no shit, buy in. Not "pretty darn good," high-level hand-waiving buy in.

[17D_guy]

18 minutes ago, ViperMan said:

Completely agree that they're complex issues that require study, and I know everyone here is actually concerned about solving these problems, it's more just a disagreement about what the core problem is, and what the solution should be.

I think that when there is such vehement disagreement on what the problem is and what the solutions are, doing something contentious is very risky. Any solution we implement will absolutely require broad (bipartisan) buy in. And actual, no shit, buy in. Not "pretty darn good," high-level hand-waiving buy in.

Agreed.  Now, how would you define the problem?  There's been a few other posts on here with a lot of good nuance.  What's your thoughts?  I apologize if I missed it before, shoot me the post and I'll read it again.

[FLEA]

3 hours ago, ViperMan said:

 

I would say one flaw to your above arguments ViperMan is that part of the reason fighter squadrons aren't 50/50 is because the anthrpomorphic standards. I don't mean to imply it's the only reason, but by your accounts, only 3% of fighter squadrons are women. Ok, remove anthropomorphic standards, and now that goes up to 9%, remove something else, and it goes up to 15%. Keep removing enough barriers and over 2 decades maybe you're now at 40% or more which is realistic. We probably don't know all the barriers, we just know anthrpomorphic standards are one. 

The second error is since the T-6 adopted the ACES II, you now require anthropomorphics for any airframe. While female aircrew might be low on fighter squadrons it's much higher I think in other communities. (I want to say 21% across pilot field but I can't find where I read that recently.)  

I do personally know women removed from UPT selection for anthroporphics. One happens to be the most competent officer I've met in my life. She will get out now after 7 years and the AF is going to lose horribly on that. 

 

[Guardian]

So here’s an alternate take on the subject: Blacks, along with other minorities are routinely prosecuted for crimes that whites are not. It’s kind of a chicken/egg argument, like your argument that fighters are designed for men because men have been the ones to step up to the task. It’s not that women weren’t up to the task, it’s that they were prohibited from it for a multitude of reasons, one of them being they don’t fit into cockpits. I honestly do not mean to insinuate that you or anyone else is being sexist or racist. I just think some of us need a little light shed on the fact that these issues are far more complex and nuanced than they often appear on the surface, and will require real study to overcome. 

Where us the evidence that whites proportionally cause as much crime as blacks and don’t get prosecuted for it

[Guardian]

Also there is a historical aspect (traditional roles and physically adept ones) to men protecting women and being the physically bigger and stronger ones that out themselves in harms way on behalf of women. That’s not sexist. That’s been traditional male roles nearly all of human history. So if we didn’t design something that we didn’t intend to have women use, it’s not sexist in that way, in that time, in that context. It’s only recently (relatively speaking) that our military has started being inclusive with women in the front line. I realize that is a double edged sword with sexism. But I genuinely do think the men of that day by and large were of the mindset that didn’t even think about it. Not because they were trying to keep the woman down (sexism) but because this is the role we readily accept. I’m not denying that there is bad sexism out there or has been. But I’m saying that it my opinion that the ergonomics of the cockpit aren’t designed for women or men of boundary stature for good cause not nefarious keep someone down causes.

[slackline]

Also there is a historical aspect (traditional roles and physically adept ones) to men protecting women and being the physically bigger and stronger ones that out themselves in harms way on behalf of women. That’s not sexist. That’s been traditional male roles nearly all of human history. So if we didn’t design something that we didn’t intend to have women use, it’s not sexist in that way, in that time, in that context. It’s only recently (relatively speaking) that our military has started being inclusive with women in the front line. I realize that is a double edged sword with sexism. But I genuinely do think the men of that day by and large were of the mindset that didn’t even think about it. Not because they were trying to keep the woman down (sexism) but because this is the role we readily accept. I’m not denying that there is bad sexism out there or has been. But I’m saying that it my opinion that the ergonomics of the cockpit aren’t designed for women or men of boundary stature for good cause not nefarious keep someone down causes.

That is absolutely the point trying to be made here. It wasn’t done because of/by sexist/racist people. The thought process at the time excluded those people. We haven’t corrected for it yet. The cockpit sizing issue is a very difficult one to tackle because it requires significant chuncks of dollars to fix. Other issues (before you ask, they’ve already been highlighted in here multiple times) are not as difficult to tackle.

No one is accusing anyone of being racist/sexist.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[herkbier]

10 hours ago, Prozac said:

A good example along the same lines from the book Freakanomics:
https://slate.com/business/2005/04/a-roshanda-by-any-other-name.html

TLDR: “Steve” has a better chance at success than “D’Shaun” for myriad complex reasons. 

Yeah, read the article, it’s not because of the name itself.

“The data show that, on average, a person with a distinctively black name—whether it is a woman named Imani or a man named DeShawn—does have a worse life outcome than a woman named Molly or a man named Jake. But it isn’t the fault of his or her name. If two black boys, Jake Williams and DeShawn Williams, are born in the same neighborhood and into the same familial and economic circumstances, they would likely have similar life outcomes. But the kind of parents who name their son Jake don’t tend to live in the same neighborhoods or share economic circumstances with the kind of parents who name their son DeShawn. And that’s why, on average, a boy named Jake will tend to earn more money and get more education than a boy named DeShawn. DeShawn’s name is an indicator—but not a cause—of his life path.”

Regardless.. please don’t feel I’m dismissing the point of the argument. Like most people, I agree with you.
 

There is a racial problem in America, I just disagree with the Root Cause analysis and the instructional fixes. 

Edited November 9, 2020 by herkbier

[Guardian]

Ok. For this argument let’s say that is true and there are zero other reasons than name. How do you fix a name bias?