The fact that a taxpayer funded diversity directorate for each service branch exists is both scary and puzzling.
It's not limited to the Navy. Go into any medium to large company and you will see 3-4 plaques with pictures of executives and full-page expositions telling you how important diversity is to their companies. Your angst is not with the DoD; it's with the equal opportunity laws that mandate such things. It's a CYA so that if a specific branch/store gets accused of discrimination, they can say it's contrary to corporate policy and fire the store/branch/whatever manager.
All I am saying is that the perception exists that under qualified minorities and females are given chances that wouldn't be afforded to non-female non-minorities. I have seen it happen.
I have seen it happen but only in jobs where people are relatively expendable, so it's an easy way to hire minorities and say 'look, we don't discriminate.' How many minority flag and general officers does the military have compared to the population? Women? I think that if one gets filtered out at something like the O-4 board or DH screening, or even getting accepted for a commissioning program at all, then pointing to minority racial/gender favoritism is just an excuse for past poor performance and is not based on any facts. It's essentially saying "I wish I were black so my 2.8 gpa and bad ASTB scores would have been good enough to be accepted as an SNA," when that individual has no idea what the average GPA or ASTB score of black SNAs accepted for OCS in FY2013 actually was.
It pollutes the waters and doesn't fix the underlying problem, which is why doesn't our all volunteer force appeal to minorities and ladies in the numbers that exist in society?
We fully agree here. Diversity initiatives attempt to treat the symptom, not the cause. And the causes for minorities under-achieiving compared to whites are complicated and not well understood. A portion of that is discrimination, but I think it goes much deeper than that and includes a counter-culture where one gets called racial slurs and physically attacked by people of their own race for doing 'white' things like getting good grades. I saw it happen in school and have seen successful blacks give interviews that recant similar experiences.
Concerning women, it seems to be more of a choice than anything else, at least according to surveys conducted by various major media outlets. Fewer women are willing to make sacrifices on the home front that are necessary to climb to the top of the military or corporate ladder. They don't have a male ego that identifies itself with its career. More women are content to take a 'safe' job that will let them pick up the kids from school at 3pm than one that would require working unplanned, unpaid overtime or weekends to make deadlines. Holds true in the military as well -- the last I saw, the ratio of males-to-females who do a DH tour is 2:1, not because females didn't screen but because they weren't willing to sacrifice family life.
The bottom line, though, is that we wouldn't be having this discussion if the Navy were easily able to find qualified minorities to fill its officer ranks. There is something wrong with our society when being 'average' as a minority is actually exceptional.
