Representative Blues

07/24/2016

[This is a much expanded version of my earlier treatise on the subject]

It’s the maths that concerns me.

If you commit to gender equality, then once that’s achieved you will be faced with racial equality, socioeconomic status equality, sexual orientation equality, religious beliefs equality and so on.

Say you commit to gender equality. Well that’s easy; you’re done at 50:50.

But then if you want to add sexual orientation equality, you’d have to divide one hundred percent by seven (straight men and women, and  LGBTI), or alternatively by using whatever each category’s percentage of the population is.

In a couple of the seven you still need to maintain the 50:50 gender mix.
And overall you have to keep the 50:50 gender mix.

Once having achieved that you then have to move onto race, socioeconomic status, and religion, whilst maintaining the gender and sexual orientation ratios.

Without looking too far into it, I suspect that you’d pretty quickly wander into a world of mathematical impossibilities, and you would be forced to abandon the plan.

But if you stop at gender equality then you could be accused of stating that gender is more important than race, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation or whether you cycle or not, when it comes to, say, political representation or company board representation.

Mathematically speaking, the politically correct types that are currently promoting just gender equality are morons

However, I have a solution.

Firstly, assuming one cannot simultaneously satisfy the proportional representative requirements of gender, sexual orientation, religion, race and socioeconomic status, then in each of the important categories of human activity we should select just one of these for balanced representation.

Secondly, in the interests of fairness, each is only a winner in one of the five important categories. What I’m describing is a derivative of fair representation.A first; you heard it here.

Politics is mostly about collecting taxes and distributing them, so I say that political representation should be based on socioeconomic status.

This would require the major parties to adhere to strict policies when appointing candidates.

Candidates would be selected on merit of course (just as much as they are now; not much) but the overall balance of the socioeconomic status of candidates would reflect the distribution on wealth in the population at large.

(Paradox alert; as soon as they are elected this balance would be fucked because of the salaries and perks that MPs get. But let’s assume, for the sake of this discussion that their sense of where they come from lasts at least a term in parliament and thereafter they are each re-categorized into their new socioeconomic niche. This approach may have a side benefit of forcing some to leave from time to time so that parties can get the representative balance right).

Teachers are in many ways the most important people in our society. They teach our little ones the basics and instill many of the values that make our societies great.

In this occupation I believe that gender balance is most important. That is, 50% of teachers should be men and 50% should be women.

Ironically this would require that many of the female primary school teachers becoming victims of a representative gender re-balancing.

This just goes to show that you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

The selection of newsreaders on TV should be based on racial distributions in our societies.

Although they are just talking heads reading canned bullshit, your average punter believes that newsreaders are the Oracles. Perception trumps all.

Indeed, by ensuring that the race of newsreaders is fairly distributed, the maximum sense of societal inclusiveness will be miraculously engendered, at virtually no cost. You could teach a hamster to read the news.

Company boards represent shareholder rights and manage the managers of the companies. In this category religious balance is most critical.

That is, board membership should fairly mimic the distribution of atheists, agnostics, Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, etc in society at large.

My reasoning here is that boards are supervisory in nature and the values of religion (or non-religions) are those most aligned with this activity.

Religions, apart from the stories of the odd imaginary friend, teach us how we should treat our fellow citizens. Religions come with all sorts of ‘how not to’s’ that are generally ignored but would be very useful if practiced by board members.

Large company management is responsible for building shareholder value. Usually promoted through the workforce, management selection should include processes that ensure proportional representation of the seven sexual orientations in the population.

Why I hear you ask?

Well, I haven’t a clue. But the four other categories have already been assigned so large company management gets sexual orientation by default.

The truth of it is, large companies pretty much run themselves. You could put a bunch of puppies at the helm and they’d do OK, or not, as the case may be.

Indeed if they all had the burden of selecting sexually-oriented representative senior management they’d all be equally affected by the change and none of them would be worse off in a competitive sense. Or better off, as the case may be.

At the very least you’d hope that sexual harassment in the work place would become a thing of the past.