[raisinbread1234]

My company sent a mail to all...."we have achieved XX.X percentage of women...we intend to go for YY.Y percentage! ...we didn't do this by hiring women intentionally, we did this by choosing the best people for the job" What crap. The situation now is that even if a man qualifies better than a woman for a job, they would choose a woman for boosting the numbers. This is gender discrimination. The companies must be sued for that.

[crispyambulance]

You're assuming that it is even possible to objectively determine one's suitability for any given job. It is not and never has been.

Many, many jobs are filled simply by virtue of the candidate's professional contacts, half-baked interview processes, and gut-instinct. Given this, it won't hurt to make an effort to hire more women and minorities in roles where they've been underrepresented.

[leereeves]

If it's impossible to determine a candidate's suitability for any given job, how can the employer claim to be choosing the best people for the job?

Under your interpretation, they're still lying.

[crispyambulance]

It is not objectively possible.

You can't _really_ tell, in advance, if one candidate or another is better suited. Sure, a "D" student who failed at the white-board is probably not a good choice compared to an "A" student who aced the whiteboard... usually.

But what we're talking about here, at worst, is relatively minor differences in a female vs male candidate, where the underrepresented gender gets a "boost." In other hiring scenarios, the candidate's professional contacts or school pedigree or family connections may give a similar (or even greater) boost.

[ameister14]

It is possible to objectively determine one's suitability for some jobs, though possibly not all jobs.

[raisinbread1234]

All play by the same same rules...fair or unfair....women should learn how to compete and not cry sexism.

[geofft]

> My company sent a mail to all...."we have achieved XX.X percentage of women...we intend to go for YY.Y percentage! ...we didn't do this by hiring women intentionally, we did this by choosing the best people for the job" What crap. The situation now is that even if a man qualifies better than a woman for a job, they would choose a woman for boosting the numbers.

That is literally the opposite of what the email says, unless you think that a) the company is intentionally lying and b) fewer than XX.X percentage of women are qualified for the job. (Since you haven't stated what XX.X is, I am somewhat worried that you think that this is true for all XX.X > 0.)

Also, this idea that there is a total order of humans on "qualified for the job" seems a little naive, as does the idea that your interview process can reliably identify the total order. In every interview process I've been involved with, we're perfectly happy to take anyone who's qualified for the job (and we barely trust our interview process to yield that one bit of information reliably) and interested in the job. If there are multiple candidates, we're usually happy to try to take all of them. If we can't, we're much more interested in finding who's the better fit for the team, including axes like skill gaps on the team and cultural fit, than ranking the successful candidates on who's "better qualified".

[leereeves]

It's pretty transparently a lie.

If they intend to increase the percentage of women, they intend to hire women. Hiring "the best people for the job" might increase the percentage of women, or decrease it, and would not be a reliable strategy to achieve the stated goal.

[geofft]

> Hiring "the best people for the job" might increase the percentage of women, or decrease it, and would not be a reliable strategy to achieve the stated goal.

Why? Maybe you know, or at least strongly believe, that your previous hiring has been biased against women, in which case starting to hire the best people for the job would be (to your belief) a reliable strategy.

[leereeves]

Let's assume ability is independent of sex, completely measurable, and completely random, and remember that 80% of engineers are men (a fact an individual employer can't change in the short term).

Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man, a 64% chance the best two are both men, a 51% chance the best three are all men, and so on.

Hiring the best candidates isn't a reliable strategy for increasing the percentage of women unless the current percentage of women is near 0 and you plan on hiring a lot of people.

If the current percentage of women is over 20%, hiring the best candidates is actually more likely to decrease the percentage of women.

[geofft]

> Let's assume ability is independent of sex, completely measurable, and completely random, and remember that 80% of engineers are men (a fact an individual employer can't change in the short term).

> Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man,

Hold up, I think you skipped a step there. I claim that 80% of engineers are men because of sexist employment practices, not because 80% of people qualified to be an engineer are men and employment practices are entirely unbiased.

[leereeves]

> I claim that 80% of engineers are men because of sexist employment practices

Only if requiring a relevant degree is a sexist employment practice.

The 80/20 ratio begins in college, or earlier. Again, not something an individual employer can correct for in the short term.

[orless]

It does not matter if 80% of engineers are men, it matters if 80% of engineers interviewing with your company are men.

The company can try to attract more women to interviews thus changing the 80%. Then you will hire more women, still selecting best people for the job. And it's not "hiring women intentionally" on my book.

[leereeves]

> The company can try to attract more women to interviews

That would certainly be recruiting women intentionally.

[orless]

This does not have to be gender discrimination. You can achieve this by making your company a better environment for women. This will get you more women in interviews and you'll end up with more female hires.

[eh78ssxv2f]

> The situation now is that even if a man qualifies better than a woman for a job, they would choose a woman for boosting the numbers.

How did you conclude that? May be they are just making the work environment more suitable for women? May be more women are applying to your workplace? How did you conclude that the women engineers coming in are less qualified than men?