[mvarner]

I believe the idea behind diversity initiatives is to ensure that the starting pool of 100 people is representative of larger demographics. Women make up ~50% of Carnegie Mellon's undergraduate computer science department (for instance). It's not like there's a dearth of qualified women.

[throw_away_777]

That maybe the theory, but it often isn't how it works in practice. Unfortunately people who claims this publicly get fired. I don't know the numbers, but it would be interesting to see if the acceptance rate of a google job interview depends on gender or race.

[mvarner]

I have a feeling that if race truly played a preferential role in hiring engineers, we would see more than 1% of tech roles being filled by Black engineers at Google. ;)

https://www.google.com/diversity/

[throw_away_777]

Without knowing the distribution of the applicants, we can't say. Maybe 0.1% of all applicants are black, we don't know. In the same way, just saying 1% of tech roles are filled by black engineers doesn't imply that google's hiring practices are discriminatory.