It Takes A Generation

Imagine you have a university which tenures 1 new professor every year. Professors each stay for about 60 years before retiring, so at any given time you have about 60 tenured professors.

For as long as anyone remembers, the university has been systematically biased towards Big Endians (being, of course, people who break their boiled eggs at the big end) and systematically biased against Little Endians (who break their boiled eggs at the little end), such that 90% of professors are Big Endians.

Recently there has been a moral revolution, and it's been agreed that Little Endians (who are half the population, after all, and hold up half the yolk) clearly ought to have equal representation in positions of power and prestige. In an attempt to accomplish this, Little Endians are preferentially hired for the next few decades until the professoriate is split 50-50.

What happens next?

Well, the younger half of the professoriate is now overwhelmingly Little Endian. If you now switch to alternating Big and Little Endians among your new hires, 30 years from now you'll have 75% Little Endians and only 25% Big. It will take another 30 years again to achieve equality – that's 90 years since we started the attempt.

Can you get to sustainable equality faster? Sure you can: instead of redressing the historic injustice by tipping the scales in favor of Little Endians, you can just switch from 90/10 to 50/50 from the moment the revolution starts. But this has two major problems: you'll continue having massive (although diminishing) over-representation of Big Endians for decades, and it'll still take over fifty years to achieve equality.

What are the alternatives?

You could hire only Little Endians for 30 years, then only Big Endians for 30 years, and then alternate going forward. That would give you 50/50 splits after 60 years, but leave a lot of unhappy and unlucky wannabe professors who happened to be born in the wrong few decades each time.

You could speed up the turnover by term-limiting the professors instead of giving them lifetime tenure – if tenure only lasted 20 years, you could get to equality within 20 years.

You could fire ALL your professors and start over at 50/50 immediately.

Or (more gently) a bunch of the older Big Endians could nobly retire early and have their positions filled by Little Endians, which weirdly rarely seems to happen even among Big Endians who passionately support Little Endian equality.

As far as I can tell that's the entirety of your options, given the constraints. You can like these outcomes or dislike these outcomes, there's no claim here about what's good/bad/fair/otherwise, but just mathematically I think this is the option-set: it takes a generation to replace a generation.