I'm not sure why it's a "poor way of looking at things". I'm an individualist, so I believe that only harms perpetrated against specific individuals matter.
You seem to disagree, so I'm asking for a philosophical justification for your beliefs. Apparently it's based on an argumentum ad populum - if the masses consider some dimension empirically meaningful, slicing humanity on that dimension is morally meaningful as well.
Then again, if you want to go down the road of argumentum ad populum, I can guarantee you that everyone will also consider "height", "weight", "hair color", "good looks" and "pleasant personality" as meaningful dimensions to classify humans.
People with high levels of "good looks" and "pleasant personality" are also treated differently than people with low levels of these values, as are people with a high level of weight / height.
Should we also be concerned if, e.g., ugly people or those with an unpleasant personality are poorly represented in some field?
Yes, it is worth being concerned about this one particular subgroup, because among the 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humans, there might be something easily correctable which yields great results.
If you want to appeal to historical discrimination as something easily correctable, we've already fixed it. It worked across the board, but to varying degrees (e.g. women went up to >50% of doctors, <20% of physicists, >50% of journalists, etc).
You seem to disagree, so I'm asking for a philosophical justification for your beliefs. Apparently it's based on an argumentum ad populum - if the masses consider some dimension empirically meaningful, slicing humanity on that dimension is morally meaningful as well.
Then again, if you want to go down the road of argumentum ad populum, I can guarantee you that everyone will also consider "height", "weight", "hair color", "good looks" and "pleasant personality" as meaningful dimensions to classify humans.
People with high levels of "good looks" and "pleasant personality" are also treated differently than people with low levels of these values, as are people with a high level of weight / height.
Should we also be concerned if, e.g., ugly people or those with an unpleasant personality are poorly represented in some field?
Yes, it is worth being concerned about this one particular subgroup, because among the 2^(6 billion) subgroups of humans, there might be something easily correctable which yields great results.
If you want to appeal to historical discrimination as something easily correctable, we've already fixed it. It worked across the board, but to varying degrees (e.g. women went up to >50% of doctors, <20% of physicists, >50% of journalists, etc).