Will Okun, a teacher in a Chicago selective enrollment high school, has an interesting discussion, here, of various “disparities” in the eight such high schools in the Chicago public school system. (HatTip to reader Jian Li)
There are, of course, the usual suspect “disparities” in the “representation” of various groups — whites and Asians are “overrepresented” and blacks and Hispanics are “underrepresented” — but Okun spends most of the piece discussing the gender “disparities.” Girls are significantly “overrepresented” and do significantly better work. Okun tries, without much success, to figure out why, and the explanations of students in his class, which he quotes extensively, don’t get much beyond such observations as girls are smarter, they work harder, boys are lazy, boys need more “role models,” etc. These explanations are about on the level of most discussion of these issues in the mainstream press, and thus don’t explain much.
Here’s my suggestion: forget it! Indeed, if through some New Year’s magic I could impose a behavior change on everyone and every institution involved in discussing or dealing with race, ethnicity, and gender, it would be to ban the use of such terms as “disparities,” “underrepresentation,” “underrepresentation,” etc., except in situations where race, ethnic, or gender discrimination is alleged.
In the absence of discrimination it simply doesn’t matter how many boys or girls, blacks or Asians, Methodists or Muslims are accepted or hired or promoted or whatever. If there is discrimination, then it is wrong regardless of whether it has more of an impact on some groups than on others, and the solution is to eliminate it, not to introduce more of it by introducing new discrimination in the form of racial preferences or ““gender weighting in the [college prep] admissions process,” which is now being considered in Chicago.
