What you're supposed to do is go to places with more black people and start advertising to people in general they can become air traffic controllers. Then take them through air traffic controller training school and at the end, you *don't* have only 10 qualified black applicants.
The US population is around 1/8 black. Which means, if every kid has an equal opportunity (in an absolute sense or on average) to develop the requisite skills to be an air traffic controller and if every kid was equally inclined to apply, and the application process were fair, then eventually around 1/8 of air traffic controllers would be black. Which seems like a good outcome.
If 1/8 of the population is black and someone is trying to get 1/4 of air traffic controllers to be black, that seems like a mistake.
It doesn't mean that at all.
Well, depending on what you mean. It could just be that your premise is known to be false.
There are enough differences in socialization, current population education levels, current incarceration rates/history in the population, etc. to make that essentially impossible yes?
As to if they are fair or not? Probably not. are you going to fix it, and if so, how?
We can argue about theoretical from birth path differences all we want, but no one on the hiring side has the time to deal with those or to control them - and if looking at things from a coarse population level - it just doesn’t reflect actual reality right now, yes?
Large American employers basically all face the same double bind: if they do not disriminate in hiring, they almost certainly will not get the demographic ratios the EEOC wants, and will get sued successfully for disparate impact (and because EVERYTHING has disparate impact, and you cannot carry out a validation study on every one of the infinite attributes of your HR processes, everyone who hires people is unavoidably guilty all the time). But if they DO discriminate, and get caught, then that's even more straightforwardly illegal and they get sued too.
There is only one strategy that has a chance of not ending you up on the losing end of a lawsuit: deliberately illegally discriminate to achieve the demographic percentages that will make the EEOC happy, but keep the details of how you're doing so secret so that nobody can piece together of the story to directly prove illegal discrimination in a lawsuit. (It'll be kinda obvious it must've happened from the resulting demographics of your workforce, but that's not enough evidence.) The FAA here clearly failed horribly at the "keep the details secret" part of this standard plan.
What I think is weird is how many firms have this reason, but do it for other stated reasons and don't simply state this compliance nuance. I figure more people would accept your "paragraph three strategy" as an acceptable means to a required end. Maybe this threat is more of a "what if" that has lower probability of enforcement so in practice, getting hunted for this is not that likely.
