"Why are 2/3 of our maths grads white men?"
"Hmmm, don't know. What were our applicant demographics?. Ooh, they are only 60% white men. Lets dig..." etc etc.
If you don't have the data you cannot identify where in the pipeline an anomaly starts
Why would you ask that in the first place?
Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
Or that people have different preferences?
> Presuming women and men have equal math abilities (I assume this is true) and equal desire to obtain degrees (not entirely sure; this is a very controversial topic) you would expect that an unbiased selection process would generate 50% male/female ratio.
If by that you mean that "for each degree, the percentage of the people that want to get it follows the repartition in the population", it is absolutely not true. I don't know why or what mechanism are at play here, but assuming that this is all bias seems very weird.
> Again, many assumptions and conclusions in what i just said are not absolutely certain.
I think this is a really weak reason to collect racial statistics in the first place.
> Many departments are currently realizign they play a role in systemic discrimination, and those ratios help them understand how far they are from the mean.
That's true, but you can also base yourself on things like revenu which seems to be more universal than race.
I hope you realize this process started over 50 years ago. Most fields turned and are now dominated by women. The few fields that are still not dominated by women are probably that way for another reason than discrimination, women are far too good at taking over fields for some discrimination to stop them from doing so.
