The Project

FOR

DAN YOUMANS
NEWS EDITOR

We live in a society where one’s gender, ethnic background, age, or sexual preference can be used as an uncanny predictor of the kind of job you do, or the kind of life you lead. Take a look at the House of Commons: more than 80% of MPs are men, and more than 95% are white. What message does this send to women, or to those of other ethnicities?

Answer: that you are not good enough. That ‘people like you’ just don’t do that job, that such a profession is for ‘other people’.

Positive discrimination - giving a leg up to a specified group, is one of the few effective ways our society can engage with these imbalances and injustices around us.

Granting systemic advantages to certain groups stops us simply talking about the problem of inequity, and allows us to begin tackling it. The imbalances in parliament continue across most industries- big business, journalism, and banking, to highlight but a few.

It’s easy to say that positive discrimination treats the symptom, not the cause of this problem, and that the right medicine is something called ‘education’ or ‘social mobility’. In a sense, this holds within it a grain of truth: education that promotes tolerance, ambition, and motivation, and a welfare state that gives everyone a fair shot in life are prerequisites. But, in most instances, these appeals for ‘better education’ or the like are just that: appeals, delaying tactics, a neat opportunity to kick the ball into the long grass.

Even when these structures are in place, progress can be painstakingly slow: despite investment in getting mothers back to school or the fact that girls consistently out-perform boys in school, the top 20 professions for women are the exact same as they were half a century ago, with teacher, nurse, and secretary making the top three.

But, by using positive discrimination at work, we can catalyse this amelioration: by giving those our society has ill-treated a shot, by letting others see that women, ‘ethnic minorities’, the differently-abled, and all others can be PM, MPs, CEOs, or MDs, we can break the current deadlock.

The battle for equality will never be easy, but positive discrimination is one weapon in our arsenal we cannot afford to neglect.