It is against commonly held intuitions that a group can be both over-represented in a profession, school, or program, and discriminated against. The simplest way to test for discrimination is to look at the general population, find the percent that a group represents, then expect them to represent exactly that percentage in any endeavour, absent discrimination.

Harvard, for example, is 17.1% Asian-American (foreign students are broken out separately in the statistics I found, so we’re only talking about American citizens or permanent residents in this post). America as a whole is 4.8% Asian-American. Therefore, many people will conclude that there is no discrimination happening against Asian-Americans at Harvard.

This is what would happen under many disparate impact analyses of discrimination, where the first step to showing discrimination is showing one group being accepted (for housing, employment, education, etc.) at a lower rate than another.

I think this naïve...

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