[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.

[geofft]

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

One, there's a difference between necessary and sufficient. You can get a degree with a 4.0; you can get a degree with a 2.0. It seems entirely plausible to believe that (especially if, as argued by James Damore, men are attracted to tech because it's a high-status field) the number of men who are good at their job is a small subset of those who have a CS degree.

Two, if we believe that the 80/20 ratio begins in college and is reflective of biases and not actual ability, then it's at least reasonable to argue that requiring a degree is a sexist practice. (It might not be, too, but I think it's not 100% clear that it isn't.)

Here's a report from HBR on why women interested in studying engineering in college leave: https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...

If there is a social effect from a sexist culture that discourages women who are struggling with their engineering classes from staying with their original choice of degree, but doesn't equally discourage men who are struggling with their engineering classes, we'd definitely expect to see the phenomenon I suggested above where more men receive engineering degrees than women, but that's not reflective of men being better at the work on average.

(Also, the HBR report points out that internships and job prospects have the effect of pushing apparent sexism back down the pipeline into college. People are smart enough to tell that they're better off picking a different field if they'll be unhappy in their current one. So causality can certainly be such that sexist practices in industry hiring create visible gender imbalance in college degrees.)

Three, plenty of tech companies have quite loudly proclaimed that a CS degree is not something you need to get into tech. Peter Thiel literally runs a fellowship encouraging people to drop out of college. Lots of famous founders are college dropouts. It makes little financial sense to go back and get a CS degree if you didn't make the decision to get one at 18; requiring one doesn't seem like a high-quality hiring practice, even leaving demographics and discrimination (in whatever direction) entirely out of the question. You'll have tons of false negatives.

[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]

Correct, recruiting women intentionally, not hiring intentionally.