<p>Stories like this always seem to duck the real issue:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Any group is most likely to select for future membership new members that look and act just like current members. (In some mountain communities, we called that "inbreeding"...)</p></li>
<li><p>College departments will, left to their own, pick new colleagues (new faculty) that do their research in the current departmental style on the current departmental hot areas.</p></li>
<li><p>to the degree that outsiders (OK, in most cases, the outsiders will be minorities and/or women) approach their research a different way, looking at different problems, they will be screened out.</p></li>
<li><p>gender based differences to problem solving are well known</p></li>
<li><p>problem solving differences due to different life experiences (be that racial, ethnic, SES based...) are known.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>So yea, without a big push, a big boot in the bottom, maybe even a quota?, college faculties are unlikely to embrace a broader outlook, sometimes called diversity.</p>
<p>The sad part is that faculties usually criticize diversity moves as weakening academic quality, without ever doing the experiment. Worse, since they define quality normed to their current approach to the problems they like, the whole process becomes circular. </p>
<p>Are quotas the solution? Probably not, but it is curious that nonacademic workplaces that have used quotas, whether formal or informal, have not always suffered from the experience, although some so called qualified white males have, of course, suffered.</p>
<p>Quotas are usually a last step solution when other means have failed. I do wonder if the academy has not failed with other solutions and may need a dose of quota medicine?</p>