[jason_dstillery]

If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates, there's a good chance it's because you're biased (intentionally or not) in your recruiting or evaluation.

In that sense, "focusing on the pool of applicants and making sure everyone gets a fair shake" are pretty much exactly what diversity efforts are about.

[ajhurliman]

By their wording, it seems like they're more focused on the outcome of the hiring process. No black managers is the outcome, and they said that's unacceptable.

If you look at the process instead of the outcome, it might not be the same. If the scenario was that no qualified black people applied for management positions which resulted in not having any black managers they could still come back to the public and say "We have nothing to apologize for, we tried to hire black managers but none applied" instead of "We failed, we don't have any black managers and it's our fault".

It's good to be unbiased in your hiring practices, but you can only shoulder so much blame. There are many factors that play into the process and you can only accept responsibility for your own actions.

[jason_dstillery]

How do you evaluate whether your process is good or bad without looking at the outcome it produces? While I grant that even the best/fairest processes can fail on individual cases, if your aggregate result is poor, what other conclusion can you draw except that your process is broken?

To take your example, if the scenario was that no qualified person from a given group applied, you can look at your process and ask what prevented them from doing so. Maybe there's a perception that your organization is hostile to that group, and you can do something to address that perception. Maybe your job postings are only going up in places that target a specific type. Maybe your 3rd-party recruiters are biased. Whatever the reason is, if the broader population of qualified candidates includes groups that aren't applying to your organization, that's pointing to a process problem you can try to fix (which I very much think of as accepting responsibility for my own actions).

[GunboatDiplomat]

>there's a good chance it's because you're biased (intentionally or not) in your recruiting or evaluation.

I don't think this is necessarily the case. Or even likely the case. For example, we know that the number of blacks, latinos, and women studying CS, etc., is much lower than their proportion in the population. It follows that even the most equitable tech company is unlikely to have demographics which match the population at large. You can't hire black coders in proportion to the general population if black coders form 5% (or whatever it is) of coders while black people form 14% of the general population. The math just doesn't work.

[jason_dstillery]

I tried to be careful in my phrasing, which is why I said "broader population of qualified candidates" and not "population at large" or "general population", and "good chance" instead of "certainty", because as you point out there are unfortunately systemic factors outside of your immediate short-term control that will affect the numbers.

But I think a lot of people/companies use this as an excuse to just not even try, and that doesn't make sense. Even if a group's share of qualified candidates is smaller than its share of the general population, that share certainly isn't zero, and once your team reaches a certain size its not hard to check the math and see if your process is producing results in bounds of reasonable estimates. Very frequently it isn't, and that can point to hidden or explicit biases that you can work to remove from your process.

[GunboatDiplomat]

>But I think a lot of people/companies use this as an excuse to just not even try, and that doesn't make sense.

Doesn't it? I doubt that hiring people of different ethnic backgrounds from the same country makes any difference in the performance of a team, so exerting extra effort to do so is likely a net loss for the company.

[jason_dstillery]

Let's say I see 2 qualified candidates a week and they accept our offer at a rate of 20%. To ramp up to a team of 12, I'll had to have seen 60 candidates, which will take 30 weeks.

But then I take a look at my process and realize I've got a problem that's keeping 1/3rd of my qualified candidates from even applying. Fix that, and I jump up to seeing 3 qualified candidates per week, which drops my ramp time to just 20 weeks.

The effort I put into fixing my hiring process just gave me 10 bonus weeks of a fully-ramped team. If your company actually knows how to use developers to make money, that could be literally millions of dollars.

[pron]

But it's also possible that the reason that some groups are underrepresented because is because they don't like their prospects (say, in term of a welcoming work environment). Causality works both up and down the pipeline; not just up.

[GunboatDiplomat]

It's possible, but you'd have to prove it, and I think that's an uphill battle.

Further, that's not what the previous poster was saying, and not what I was addressing. They said that there's a high degree of likelihood that not reflecting the population at large is the result of bias. That, as I said, is not likely to be true.

[pron]

> That, as I said, is not likely to be true.

I think it's by far the likeliest explanation given everything we know of human societies and human history (i.e, as a general rule, almost everything is fluid). Moreover, it's the safest: if, as a result of such under-representations, certain groups have less power in society, it's unreasonable not to try to fix it. If people get sick and you don't know if the disease is curable or not, the far safer (and more ethical) assumption is that it is. Both assumptions are not symmetrical.

[nawitus]

> If your organization's demographics don't match the demographics of the broader population of qualified candidates

This hasn't been demonstrated.