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Notes -
MIT no longer requires diversity statements for faculty hires.
Allegedly. The only sources I’ve seen covering this are not exactly paragons of journalism, citing emails rather than anything public. MIT’s own website still describes the practice in glowing terms. I am curious whether the general population of MIT staff—the ones maintaining their websites—is in favor of this change, or if any of them were consulted.
Assuming this is credible, let’s make some predictions.
I know it's hopelessly, comically naive, but I'm still just kind of blown away that this ever became a thing. There is probably nothing that marks me as more of a 90s lib than thinking that the appropriate answer to, "what will you do for diversity, equity, inclusion?" has always been, "I promise to embrace the quality of work that any potential student does without regard to their race or gender, I care about physics, not skin color". That this became not only unacceptable, but a sign that someone is actually quite racist is just absolutely amazing and completely irreconcilable with a university caring about merit.
I suspect that serious technical institutions are more likely to scrap these things for exactly that reason. You can't DEI your way to being able to do math, physics, or chemistry that actually works. Other departments are perfectly safe to keep using these political statements though - sociology departments produces can net-negative knowledge, there is no requirement that they ever do anything that actually works, and nothing about their funding relies on that changing.
Sounds like you are saying that the STEM subjects are intrinsically white and racist, while the social sciences are sufficiently enlightened.
I kid, I kid.
In my model of reality, the STEM-powered industrial revolution did more to (ultimately and mostly inadvertetly) improve the lot of formerly non-free underclasses in two centuries than the humanities and social sciences did in two millennia.
For what it's worth, I share your ideal of being color-blind instead of putting one's hand on the scales to ensure equality of outcomes. The ultimate arbitrator of what constitutes good physics should be reality, not a HR panel.
Or more generally:
I don't think there's anything more complex than that going on here. I think the lack of biological specialization in objective usefulness is a serious problem to people who were sold "if you waste your life on this degree, you'll be just as objectively useful as men are", and so need to compensate [in a way indistinguishable from them truly believing it].
And the way you compensate in a zero-sum environment... is to impose taxes. And if you want to levy taxes, you need a good excuse, and what better excuse to use than something currently intractable like "disparate impact"?
While I can not speak for HR panels, I want to emphasize that I do not think that men enjoy any biological specialization which makes them relevantly better at STEM than their female colleagues. At my workplace, we have perhaps 40% women and for whatever weird subsubpopulation ends up in my field (a non-booming field of physics), I do not see gender being correlated with competence. (There are significant variances within specialties, FWIW. The small subset of colleagues who I consider to be good or great programmers are mostly male. On the other hand, women are more likely to actually ask for help. Just the other day, I chased a crash down the entirely wrong rabbit hole with a debugger and might have wasted hours which my female colleague in the end solved in five minutes with an email.)
While I think that there are certainly degrees and occupations which have more or less objective usefulness (e.g. medicine vs grievance studies), I do not believe there is much in the way of correlation between gender-codedness and objective usefulness.
I mean, I consider woke studies -- which are coded female -- to be net negative, but I also consider marginal contributions to the capabilities of the world's militaries to be net negative, with the security dilemma being a prime example of an inadequate equilibrium if there ever was one.
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