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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION
Letter of the Day
Risking gender inequity
Any efforts to deal with gender, ethnic, or other imbalances, whether at work or school (U of M tries to engineer gender-balance fix, July 21), must take great pains to be both fair and rational. Otherwise they risk perpetrating inequities, rather than correcting them, and worsening inter-group relations.
Fairness arises because correcting one imbalance (e.g., more males than females in engineering) without correcting other imbalances (e.g., more females than males in nursing) means one group will overall enjoy greater representation across all university programs.
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Assuming equality of aptitude and interest, this is clearly an unfair and inequitable outcome.
That the process be rational arises from two related considerations. First, the presence of more females than males in some programs (e.g., nursing, teaching), means there are fewer females and more males available to participate in other programs (e.g., engineering, physics). It is irrational to expect equal numbers to come from populations of markedly unequal sizes.
A second reason to emphasize rationality follows from the many psychological factors that contribute to people's occupational and educational choices, including interests, tradition, aptitudes, perceived opportunities, and a host of other factors.
Given these myriad factors, any of which could vary by gender, imbalances in numbers do not necessarily indicate institutional biases that need to be corrected.
Societies and institutions should certainly strive to eliminate artificial barriers to participation in educational programs, but in doing so, they need to be careful their efforts are fair to all parties and reasonable given the complexity of human behaviour, including occupational choices.
JIM CLARK
Psychology department
University of Winnipeg
Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition July 24, 2012 A11
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