[Aapjes]

Imagine a theoretical scenario where they have 500 female applicants and 9,500 male applicants, but desperately want a 50/50 workforce. Then they logically would hire all female applicants, including those who are not part of the 2000 most capable applicants.

Using your number, with 2k out of 10k applications being indistinguishable elite, that means 1 in 5 applicants are suitable to be hired on merit. Assuming that female applicants are no better or worse than the men, you'd expect 100 of those 500 female applicants to be indistinguishable from 1,900 male applicants.

So then 400 women would be hired who are in fact distinguishable worse than those elite 100 women and 1,900 men.

[deanCommie]

You clearly have no idea how hiring works at major tech companies like Google.

1: Even if there are a 1000 positions, and only 1000 candidates, if they are underqualified, they do not get hired. Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc, try to have an objective bar, not one relative to the available candidates.

2: Nobody is pressuring for a 50/50 workforce. It's an ideal, and a reasonable-sounding long term goal, but even the most aggressive pro-diversity initiatives do not set a target of 50/50 ratio. In fact, in most cases HIRE targets aren't set at all. The targets are set for opportunities - ie number of diversity candidates evaluated or interviewed. The hiring process remains pure.

Source: Work for major top-10 tech company and do a ton of hiring, and diversity training.

[geofft]

> Imagine a theoretical scenario where they have 500 female applicants and 9,500 male applicants, but desperately want a 50/50 workforce.

I agree with your conclusions from these stats, but why is this theoretical scenario relevant? Do we believe that this more closely resembles the actual scenario than one where there are, say, 4,000 female applicants and 6,000 male ones?

[Aapjes]

Women get 18% of computer science degrees, so it seems doubtful that Google would get a 40/60 split in applicants.

But the specific numbers are not the point of my comment. The issue is that if there is a lot of pressure to get a 50/50 workforce, but the pipeline is not 50/50, then favoring less qualified men over more qualified women becomes a possibility or even very likely, since how else are you going to achieve this?

I think that it is up to those who desperately want a 50/50 workforce (just for tech, not for most of the other gender-imbalanced jobs) to make the case how they can do this without sexist discrimination in hiring or if they do favor sexism in hiring to make that explicit.