Is “Gender Balance” the New Quota System?
June 20, 2017 John S. Rosenberg Leave a comment
The Chronicle of Higher Education fretted recently about the lack of “gender balance” among college presidents. Women have achieved “gender parity” in the Ivy League, but “the Ivy League, with its eight institutions, is an outlier. Overall in higher education, the share of women presidents has barely budged, remaining at about 25 percent over the past decade.”
Aside from the epistemological challenge of figuring out how to promote “gender balance” in an employment category that has only one employee (the college president), there are other difficult questions: whether “balance” requires “parity”; whether either is necessary for fairness; and finally whether seeking “gender balance” is even legal. The Supreme Court has repeatedly asserted — by Justice O’Connor in Grutter, for example, citing earlier cases — that “outright racial balancing” is “patently unconstitutional.” If seeking a goal of “gender parity” is not outright balancing, what is?
- See more at:
http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2017/06/is-gender-balance-the-new-quota-system/#sthash.iXWzghz7.dpuf
