[terryjsmith]

That's the issue, right? Everyone wants "diversity", but no one wants quotas or hard lines that could discriminate against other groups. I think you need to do your best to root out any biases in your hiring process or people. At Uber's size there is also an evangelism role that can be played to reach out and encourage a more diverse applicant pool to apply for roles. But this report falls flat on how you could possibly measure whether your team is "diverse" or "inclusive" enough and also fails to call out any existing practices, processes or people that would've gotten them there in the first place, opting instead to use those principles as PR tools.

[pyre]

I don't know things like "we only bought jackets for the men, because it would be more expensive to buy jackets to the women... so they just don't get jackets" seems pretty divisive to me. You're trying to split hairs, but things like that are so blatant that they are screaming right in your face. If such things were really happening at Uber, then I don't think that your quibbling about "how diverse is diverse" makes any sense. They obviously have issues that need to be addressed, no?

[xapata]

So you're in the "I know it when I see it" camp?

There's the aphorism that what's measured gets improved (and what isn't measured gets worse). If you're trying to improve diversity/inclusion, how do you know you've done a good job unless you can measure it?

[pyre]

It also depends on how and what you're measuring. If you are (e.g.) measuring diversity, but measuring it in the "wrong way" you could be setting up perverse incentives to game the metrics while not truly achieving the goal.

[g-clef]

I feel like the rule should be fairly simple: your organization should match the ethnic and gender breakdown of the area it's offices are in.

So, for example, if Silicon Valley is 10% African Americans (I have no idea if that # if true, just using it for argument's sake), then your organization should be 10% African American. This also means your organization should be 50% women, since they are ~50% of the population. How you manage that (blind hiring, quota hiring, etc) is up to the company, and is difficult. But measuring proper diversity is really easy: you should reflect the local city's diversity. If you don't, you need to have a really good reason (and "we don't think we can be drinking buddies with them" is a really shitty reason).

[xapata]

Can you control for education? Why is it a company's responsibility to counteract society's bias? Even if one company could succeed at that excellent goal, it'd be impossible for all companies in an area to follow that rule. Unless many people were unemployed.