In a Wall Street Journal interview this month about “the need to focus more on women” by corporations, McKinsey & Co.’s global managing director, Dominic Barton, says: “So if I think about appointments I would do, if I have a choice between a man and a woman and they’re equal in what they’ll do, I will defer to the woman.” And Debra Lee, chairman and chief executive of Viacom Inc.’s BET Networks, says: “And it’s not about quotas. It’s about making sure you have representation on your executive team, and whether that’s minorities or women, whatever it is, you have to retain a focus on it. So the next several openings I had I just insisted that if there was a female and a male, that we would lean toward the female ….”
Well, sorry, but this clearly is about quotas. In the first place, it is almost never the case that two candidates are exactly equally qualified. So let’s face it: Less qualified people are getting the job ahead of more qualified people. In the second place, even if an exact tie did happen, if you use sex (or race or ethnicity) as a tiebreaker, then you have violated the federal civil-rights laws, because you have hired or promoted someone because of that person’s sex (or race or ethnicity). And that is not only illegal, it is also unfair and divisive.
Put the shoe on the other foot: What if Mr. Barton and Ms. Lee said that, all things being equal, they would prefer to hire white males? The comments by these two executives show an absence of good judgment and good legal advice.
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The gist of the November 16 Washington Post news article “In search of Hispanic teachers ” was that, because the number of Hispanic students is growing, Prince George’s County, Maryland, public schools and school systems elsewhere want to hire more Hispanic teachers. This is untenable as a matter of both law and logic.
Federal civil-rights statutes and the Constitution forbid hiring teachers with an eye on race or ethnicity. The Supreme Court has expressly rejected the notion that faculty racial percentages should mirror student-body racial percentages (Hazelwood School District v. United States, 1977), as well as the “role model” justification for faculty discrimination (Wygant v. Jackson Board of Education, 1986). As Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., wrote in the latter case, “Carried to its logical extreme, the idea that [minority] students are better off with [minority] teachers could lead to the very system the Court rejected in Brown v. Board of Education.”
Nor can the fact that many Hispanic students may need teachers who can speak Spanish justify a preference for Hispanic teachers. Many Hispanic teachers do not speak Spanish, and many non-Hispanic teachers do; so if the aim is to hire teachers who can speak Spanish, it makes no sense to hire on the basis of language stereotyping.
It is also wrong to suggest there is a monolithic “cultural heritage” shared by everyone with a Spanish surname.
Schools should forget about politically correct bean-counting and hire the best-qualified people.
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Finally, the federal government released its latest figures on births (“Preliminary Data for 2010”) this month. The illegitimacy numbers by race and ethnicity are essentially the same as last year’s. More than 7 out of 10 African Americans (72.5 percent) are born out of wedlock, along with more than 6 out of 10 American Indians and Alaska Natives (65.6 percent), and more than 5 out of 10 Hispanics (53.3 percent) — versus fewer than 3 out of 10 whites (29.0 percent) and fewer than 2 out of 10 Asians and Pacific Islanders (17.0 percent).
Disturbingly high for all groups (the composite figure is 40.8 percent), but do you notice any connection between these demographic-by-demographic numbers and how each group is doing educationally, economically, criminally, etc.?
