On April 6th, United Airlines announced their new plan for “equity,” and as usual with woke progressivism, it’s ridiculous and entirely misses the mark.
According to the company, “50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.”
Hey, that sounds kind of nice, right? Be more equitable and get more women and people of color into the industry by having an affirmative action quota that requires that a certain amount of new hires be female or people of color.
But let’s give this just a tiny bit of thought and see where it leads. Because it’s not actually as great as the woke progressives want you to believe.
Imagine that you’re United Airlines.
If you’re hiring pilots to fly the expensive airplanes owned by your lucrative company, you presumably want to hire the most qualified pilots. The ones who you can most easily trust to keep your customers safe and safeguard your property.
But what if you find that hiring only the most qualified pilots doesn’t quite get you to that 50% mark that you pledged in your woke progressive statement? Maybe that only gets you to 40% women and people of color. Maybe it has nothing to do with inequity, but with workforce demographics, location demographics, interest in that career path, or pure chance of the makeup of that particular hiring group. Regardless, let’s pretend that qualification alone doesn’t quite get you to that pledged 50% quota.
Does that mean you will forego a more qualified candidate in order to hire a slightly less qualified candidate who has the approved sex organs (or presumably even gender identity) and melanin content in order to hit that 50% mark? After making such a public pledge about it, it’s the only assumption that can be made. That you will set aside other considerations, including qualification, in order to fulfill that 50% quota.
I am absolutely not saying that women or people of color are less qualified pilots, or less qualified in any way at all. My own husband is an Army pilot and I am friends with incredibly qualified pilots who are female or people of color. I personally don’t believe that your sex organs or your melanin content affect your ability to be a qualified pilots, or your ability to be qualified an any job.
I’m saying that the problem with the United Airlines statement is that if you find yourself in a position where a hiring group that, for whatever reason, does not contain 50% qualified female or POC candidates, then the public will assume that you will sacrifice qualification for sexual or racial identity, because you’ve implied that you would.
And that does nothing positive for females or people of color. Think of all the qualified pilots who will wonder, “Did I get my job because I worked hard and became the most qualified candidate for the job? Or did I get hired so the company could reach their woke progressive promise of 50%?”
And when customers walk onto the plane, will they wonder if their pilot was hired based on their qualification for the job or based on their sexual or racial identity?
And will qualified pilots always wonder if the passengers are unnecessarily second guessing your qualification?
And as far as common sense goes, it’s obviously a bad decision to choose someone based on their skin color or genitals (which don’t matter at all when flying a plane) while literally the most important consideration in this particular profession is qualification to fly the plane. That’s just not a good idea.
“Next, please hire blind pilots. I always thought it were [sic] disgusting that I’ve never seen a blind pilot. The ableism made me feel unsafe on your flights. We must hire pilots based on irrelevant immutable traits to achieve true equitable safety.”
It makes no sense to consider someone’s race or gender as more significant than their actual qualification for the job, especially in a job where technical qualification is literally the most important consideration.
That’s the problem with this kind of sexual and racial quota. While it may be in the best short-term financial and PR interest of the company to mandate something like this, it’s not actually in the long-term best interest of women or people of color.
But they’d rather you didn’t give it any thought. Just take their word for it and praise them for their “efforts.”
