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Sex discrimination, gender balance, justice and publicity in admissions

Sex discrimination, gender balance, justice and publicity in admissions
Sex discrimination, gender balance, justice and publicity in admissions
This paper examines the problem of selecting a number of candidates to receive a good (admission) from a pool in which there are more qualified applicants than places. I observe that it is rarely possible to order all candidates according to some relevant criterion, such as academic merit, since these standards are inevitably somewhat vague. This means that we are often faced with the task of making selections between near-enough equal candidates. I survey one particular line of response, which says that we should allow our choice of borderline candidates to be guided by non-relevant criteria such as gender-balancing. I argue that this would not, as commonly objected, be a case of sex discrimination if it is to be applied either in favour of men or women. Nonetheless, I argue that such policies are problematic because they violate the demand for publicity, which is required for legitimacy and to assure everyone that discrimination has not in fact taken place. Instead, I suggest that, if we are concerned to avoid discrimination, there may be a case for using lotteries as tie-breakers, not on grounds of fairness but to prevent taint of bias.
0264-3758
59-71
Saunders, Ben
aed7ba9f-f519-4bbf-a554-db25b684037d
Saunders, Ben
aed7ba9f-f519-4bbf-a554-db25b684037d

Saunders, Ben (2010) Sex discrimination, gender balance, justice and publicity in admissions. Journal of Applied Philosophy, 27 (1), 59-71. (doi:10.1111/j.1468-5930.2009.00473.x).

Record type: Article

Abstract

This paper examines the problem of selecting a number of candidates to receive a good (admission) from a pool in which there are more qualified applicants than places. I observe that it is rarely possible to order all candidates according to some relevant criterion, such as academic merit, since these standards are inevitably somewhat vague. This means that we are often faced with the task of making selections between near-enough equal candidates. I survey one particular line of response, which says that we should allow our choice of borderline candidates to be guided by non-relevant criteria such as gender-balancing. I argue that this would not, as commonly objected, be a case of sex discrimination if it is to be applied either in favour of men or women. Nonetheless, I argue that such policies are problematic because they violate the demand for publicity, which is required for legitimacy and to assure everyone that discrimination has not in fact taken place. Instead, I suggest that, if we are concerned to avoid discrimination, there may be a case for using lotteries as tie-breakers, not on grounds of fairness but to prevent taint of bias.

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More information

Published date: 5 January 2010
Organisations: Faculty of Social, Human and Mathematical Sciences

Identifiers

Local EPrints ID: 370358
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/370358
ISSN: 0264-3758
PURE UUID: 1c4cb766-7d8d-43fc-9fae-82ac50540543
ORCID for Ben Saunders: ORCID iD orcid.org/0000-0002-5147-6397

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Date deposited: 22 Oct 2014 11:52
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 03:50

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