Ka-pi96 said:
The chances of that actually happening are near impossible, and the lack of it happening doesn't mean equality of opportunity wasn't achieved at all. Take for example a coin toss. Heads and tails both have an equal opportunity to win, there can be no arguing about not achieving equality there. Flip that coin 100 times and will heads and tails have won an equal amount of times? There's a chance of it, but it's far from a sure thing despite the equal opportunity. Now add in a huge number of additional factors as there would be for a something like political positions as you mentioned and even if perfectly equal opportunity is still there, the chances of actually achieving an equal outcome are now much lower than it was for the coin toss. |
Of course, this is all about probabilities. When I flip a coin 100 times, It's obviously unlikely that It's exactly 50 times head and 50 times tail but it's even much more unlikely that i get 100 times head.
Let's pretend for a moment that the chances of a parliament member being male or female is exactly 50/50. In Germany more than 50% of the parliament members are male (~70% in reality) but that's not a big deal because there's a roughly 50% chance that the majority of the members are male, so this could be just a coincident, maybe there's another country where the majority of parliament members is female. If we look at the 28 EU member states + USA and Canada we see that there isn't a single country with more female parliament members than male ones, the chance for this scenario to happen is 0,00000009%. With such a low probability I don't think it's a coincident so what we pretended in the first place must be false.
To your second point, what are these "additional factors" and are you sure these aren't contradicting the pretended equality of opportunity?
In practice, a 50/50 split is impractical because of your point and full equality of opportunity is not achievable, however a +/- 10% fluctuation should be feasible.
Last edited by MrWayne - on 10 September 2018
