The issue is that terms like "merit" are not objective and is difficult to compare. For example, male and female marines do not actually meet the same rigorous standards:
A male recruit must be able to do 6 laps in 13:30, while a female recruit must be able to do 6 laps in 15:00.
Some defenders of this double standard would argue that a 15:00 minute woman has equal merit as a 13:30 man, because they are showing an equal amount of "grit" or that the different times indicate similar heart health or other indirectly measured attributes (similar to how people of different heights are obese at different weights). But if that's the case, then having different expectations for running is not a double standard at all. However, requiring women to run the same speed as men would exclude some women of equal "grit" or underlying fitness so that's an unfair double standard.
If there was a debate about what time a female recruit should be required to get, both sides could say that they were moderate and agreed with your compromise position, while their opponent was extreme. That's probably why these debates tend to go in circles. It gets even more muddled when talking about something too abstract to be measured with a stopwatch.
(This conversation can also go in circles by arguing about specific physical tests but the AFCT also takes gender and age into account for scoring. I'm most familiar with the debate when it comes up while hiring firefighters, which always causes a spat of peevish letters to the editor)
Sure, and to be clear, my compromise position cannot resolve all debates on what equality looks like in practice. It's just a helpful articulation of an abstract ideal we can appeal to in the process.
I'm very familiar with gendered standards on the military's fitness tests and the debates that create. In this case, I think the trick is just to be specific and transparent about what sort of merit we're trying to measure. What is the purpose of fitness standards?
Is it to measure raw strength, speed, and endurance, to ensure that soldiers will be able to perform to minimum physical standard when tested on a battlefield? Is it to measure what you call "grit," or discipline, or mental fortitude? Is it a proxy for overall health, wellness, and self-care that's associated with higher mental readiness too? Is it to ensure soldiers *look* professional instead of fat and slovenly? The standards we pick should reflect the priorities that actually matter.
I think combat arms branches should have a higher standard for the ACFT, and that most other branches should have a significantly lowered standard - but that both standards should be purely gender-neutral. I don't care about grit or aesthetics or whether my finance officer can ruck march; I care about battlefield performance and retaining the best and brightest for the physically undemanding jobs behind the scenes. But equality might look different to people with different values than I have.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply (and thoughtful original post). Sorry if I seemed to be implying that you didn't know about fitness tests. That wasn't my intention as you are much more familiar with them than I am. My local fire department growing up only required male applicants to be able to lift my weight. Seems inconvenient if I was passed out during a house fire! So I'd also default to gender (and age) neutral standards for any fitness test if the job actually requires running, lifting or other physical feats.
But I don't know much about soldier's duties at all. I come from an education background And that's one industry built entirely around metrics and evaluation, even if no one agrees what they're evaluating exactly. One thing I noticed pretty quickly is that any four teachers will give five incompatible explanations for what grades "mean". Often, what's being measured can't even be quantified and any metric is flawed. However, grades are required for being able to compare any two students objectively. You might have noticed how vicious the fight over standardized testing has gotten over the last decade and seen that there doesn't seem to be any consensus about what something like an SAT score means about the test-taker. It's an interesting conversation to follow if you're interested in the debate about meritocracy.
Phrases like "identifying and eliminating structural impediments" come up quite a lot in that conversation. This often results in saying that disparate metrics (like test scores) of two people are equal when controlled for x or y. But often x or y is a potential cause of the disparity! I'm sure somewhere in the military is an administrator arguing that a 16:00 is the same as a 13:30 when controlling for gender (and they could be right mathematically) so holding people to the same standard would be a structural impediment to women. So when I read you and the salamander arguing about whether a policy that "removes structural impediments" is wrong it's difficult to follow without knowing how barriers are identified. I'm guessing the salamander is assuming that the identified barriers should not be classified as such.
In general, most DEI/meritocracy arguments are proxies for arguments about what priorities are important, how they should be measured and what counts as a structural impediment. Often, the meaning of terms like "gender-neutral" can depend on context or is used without rigorously defining what the speaker believes about what neutral is. Notably, you reasonably described the ACFT(as it currently is) as gender-neutral in your original post, despite knowing that it had gendered standards. I think a reasonable person would disagree with that description due those gendered standards but the actual disagreement(about what neutrality is) would never come up.
Kind of a tangent, but I think that these discussions will become more common in every aspect of society over the next decade for non-political reasons. As more and more decisions are made by algorithms, more and more abstract concepts like "fitness" and "merit" are going to be forced into quantifiable metrics calculated with assumptions that are impossible to know. What if the ACFT is just a rating spat out by a black box after plugging in piles of data about a recruit?
1. I started DivThu in the Bush43 administration...as I have said before, this is (well, was) a bipartisan problem.
2. As per #1, there are 20 years of writing on the topic on my OG Blog and my Substack, some of your assumptions are incomplete.
3. I'll take 75/80, but for reference: I was pro-repeal of DADT before President Obama was, pro-decriminalization of weed (I'm GenX, so I prefer that term) since Reagan was CINC, have been an environmentalist since in middleschool when Carter was CINC, have been a volunteer for conservation organizations for decades, have had zero issue with women serving since I first put on the uniform in the 1980s, again when Reagan was CINC, and became anti-interventionist (when possible) since I realized what I was part of post-911...those and a few other items used to have me called a liberal...so...OK. As for my record on DJT, a search of my X TL and blog will answer that question rather quickly. But again AD, thank you for reading and doing your best to decipher my incomplete musings. I hope you have a great 2025.
Thanks for a cordial and reasonable reply. The 75/80 was a shot in the dark about this particular spectrum of issues, not broader issues like environmentalism or non-interventionism. Your posts on Israel also seem right of center, but you don't strike me as an unthinking party man on anything and I'm glad to hear you support women in the forces and DADT-repeal. I'll keep enjoying the non DivThu posts :)
“It’s probably kind of correct that diversity of view points helps decision making. Therefore, we should have diversity quotas for hiring, promotions and school admittance based on whatever the Census says is a separate checkbox” is not a logical connection, and anyone denying the later was policy is just basically lying
The issue is that terms like "merit" are not objective and is difficult to compare. For example, male and female marines do not actually meet the same rigorous standards:
https://www.marines.com/become-a-marine/requirements/physical-fitness.html
A male recruit must be able to do 6 laps in 13:30, while a female recruit must be able to do 6 laps in 15:00.
Some defenders of this double standard would argue that a 15:00 minute woman has equal merit as a 13:30 man, because they are showing an equal amount of "grit" or that the different times indicate similar heart health or other indirectly measured attributes (similar to how people of different heights are obese at different weights). But if that's the case, then having different expectations for running is not a double standard at all. However, requiring women to run the same speed as men would exclude some women of equal "grit" or underlying fitness so that's an unfair double standard.
If there was a debate about what time a female recruit should be required to get, both sides could say that they were moderate and agreed with your compromise position, while their opponent was extreme. That's probably why these debates tend to go in circles. It gets even more muddled when talking about something too abstract to be measured with a stopwatch.
(This conversation can also go in circles by arguing about specific physical tests but the AFCT also takes gender and age into account for scoring. I'm most familiar with the debate when it comes up while hiring firefighters, which always causes a spat of peevish letters to the editor)
Sure, and to be clear, my compromise position cannot resolve all debates on what equality looks like in practice. It's just a helpful articulation of an abstract ideal we can appeal to in the process.
I'm very familiar with gendered standards on the military's fitness tests and the debates that create. In this case, I think the trick is just to be specific and transparent about what sort of merit we're trying to measure. What is the purpose of fitness standards?
Is it to measure raw strength, speed, and endurance, to ensure that soldiers will be able to perform to minimum physical standard when tested on a battlefield? Is it to measure what you call "grit," or discipline, or mental fortitude? Is it a proxy for overall health, wellness, and self-care that's associated with higher mental readiness too? Is it to ensure soldiers *look* professional instead of fat and slovenly? The standards we pick should reflect the priorities that actually matter.
I think combat arms branches should have a higher standard for the ACFT, and that most other branches should have a significantly lowered standard - but that both standards should be purely gender-neutral. I don't care about grit or aesthetics or whether my finance officer can ruck march; I care about battlefield performance and retaining the best and brightest for the physically undemanding jobs behind the scenes. But equality might look different to people with different values than I have.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply (and thoughtful original post). Sorry if I seemed to be implying that you didn't know about fitness tests. That wasn't my intention as you are much more familiar with them than I am. My local fire department growing up only required male applicants to be able to lift my weight. Seems inconvenient if I was passed out during a house fire! So I'd also default to gender (and age) neutral standards for any fitness test if the job actually requires running, lifting or other physical feats.
But I don't know much about soldier's duties at all. I come from an education background And that's one industry built entirely around metrics and evaluation, even if no one agrees what they're evaluating exactly. One thing I noticed pretty quickly is that any four teachers will give five incompatible explanations for what grades "mean". Often, what's being measured can't even be quantified and any metric is flawed. However, grades are required for being able to compare any two students objectively. You might have noticed how vicious the fight over standardized testing has gotten over the last decade and seen that there doesn't seem to be any consensus about what something like an SAT score means about the test-taker. It's an interesting conversation to follow if you're interested in the debate about meritocracy.
Phrases like "identifying and eliminating structural impediments" come up quite a lot in that conversation. This often results in saying that disparate metrics (like test scores) of two people are equal when controlled for x or y. But often x or y is a potential cause of the disparity! I'm sure somewhere in the military is an administrator arguing that a 16:00 is the same as a 13:30 when controlling for gender (and they could be right mathematically) so holding people to the same standard would be a structural impediment to women. So when I read you and the salamander arguing about whether a policy that "removes structural impediments" is wrong it's difficult to follow without knowing how barriers are identified. I'm guessing the salamander is assuming that the identified barriers should not be classified as such.
In general, most DEI/meritocracy arguments are proxies for arguments about what priorities are important, how they should be measured and what counts as a structural impediment. Often, the meaning of terms like "gender-neutral" can depend on context or is used without rigorously defining what the speaker believes about what neutral is. Notably, you reasonably described the ACFT(as it currently is) as gender-neutral in your original post, despite knowing that it had gendered standards. I think a reasonable person would disagree with that description due those gendered standards but the actual disagreement(about what neutrality is) would never come up.
Kind of a tangent, but I think that these discussions will become more common in every aspect of society over the next decade for non-political reasons. As more and more decisions are made by algorithms, more and more abstract concepts like "fitness" and "merit" are going to be forced into quantifiable metrics calculated with assumptions that are impossible to know. What if the ACFT is just a rating spat out by a black box after plugging in piles of data about a recruit?
Thanks for reading, and just a few notes for 'ya.
1. I started DivThu in the Bush43 administration...as I have said before, this is (well, was) a bipartisan problem.
2. As per #1, there are 20 years of writing on the topic on my OG Blog and my Substack, some of your assumptions are incomplete.
3. I'll take 75/80, but for reference: I was pro-repeal of DADT before President Obama was, pro-decriminalization of weed (I'm GenX, so I prefer that term) since Reagan was CINC, have been an environmentalist since in middleschool when Carter was CINC, have been a volunteer for conservation organizations for decades, have had zero issue with women serving since I first put on the uniform in the 1980s, again when Reagan was CINC, and became anti-interventionist (when possible) since I realized what I was part of post-911...those and a few other items used to have me called a liberal...so...OK. As for my record on DJT, a search of my X TL and blog will answer that question rather quickly. But again AD, thank you for reading and doing your best to decipher my incomplete musings. I hope you have a great 2025.
Thanks for a cordial and reasonable reply. The 75/80 was a shot in the dark about this particular spectrum of issues, not broader issues like environmentalism or non-interventionism. Your posts on Israel also seem right of center, but you don't strike me as an unthinking party man on anything and I'm glad to hear you support women in the forces and DADT-repeal. I'll keep enjoying the non DivThu posts :)
“It’s probably kind of correct that diversity of view points helps decision making. Therefore, we should have diversity quotas for hiring, promotions and school admittance based on whatever the Census says is a separate checkbox” is not a logical connection, and anyone denying the later was policy is just basically lying