[AnthonyMouse]

> Google's stance, as stated in the article, is that they divert more energy in to finding minority candidates. That's not the same as a lower bar. Abilities are expected to be distributed equally still.

That has a very pernicious effect across the industry though. Think about what that policy does to other companies.

The other companies won't have as many high quality women because Google scouted and hired them already, but will have just as many low and medium quality women who aren't good enough for Google, and more high quality men who were displaced from Google. Which skews the gender ratio even more and creates the impression that women at those companies are lower quality than the men there or else they would have been hired away by Google -- because it causes that impression to be the truth.

And you can't fix it by having all companies adopt that policy, because it would still transfer high quality women from lower tier companies to higher tier companies, causing problems for all the women who don't get to work for the companies in the highest tier. Even the high quality women who are still in second tier companies.

The lower tier companies are where almost everybody actually works -- small and medium companies employ more people than huge companies because there are so many more of them.

Google is being quite selfish with a policy like that.

[bduerst]

Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.

HBR found there's an innate bias against any minorities in hiring pools [1], and considering that women make up a much lower percentage of potential CS positions, the deck is probably stacked against them. This means that for other companies, they have already passed on hiring the qualified minority candidates. Speculatively, Google could be trying to counteract this by diverting more energy into finding minority candidates.

Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?

[1] https://hbr.org/2016/04/if-theres-only-one-woman-in-your-can...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Only if you assume that finding qualified minority candidates is just as easy as finding other qualified candidates. Or that hiring chances are equally distributed.

Nope, it's independent of any of that, because the effect is relative to what other companies do rather than any of those things.

And when you do that experiment in the real world rather than a lab, you get the opposite result anyway:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/07/1...

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria...

> Also, is it Google's responsibility to make sure other companies have the best candidates, minority or not?

It's not about who gets the best candidates -- presumably the men who are displaced are of equal quality and then go to work for the same other companies. The problem is that it creates an unfair black mark against every woman who doesn't get hired at Google despite Google having a special preference for them, and then leaves them in an environment with an even worse gender ratio than it was already.

And these other companies feed into Google. Plenty of women get their first jobs there and go work for Google later. If Google makes it harder for the women there and increases the number who drop out as a result, that's bad for everyone including them.

[bduerst]

>The problem is that it creates an unfair black mark against every woman who doesn't get hired at Google

Can you elaborate on this more? Or give examples?

[AnthonyMouse]

Suppose there are 5,000 women and 20,000 men with CS degrees who are seeking new employment right now. 500 women and 2000 men are above the 90th percentile, 500 women and 2000 men are between the 80th and 90th percentiles, etc.

Google has 2000 job openings. If they hired without gender preference they would end up with 1600 men and 400 women, but they make an effort to seek out women specifically and instead they hire 1200 men and 800 women. They've now hired all of the women above the 90th percentile and 300/500 between the 80th and 90th.

The gender ratio below the original 80th percentile is still 4:1, but above the 80th percentile it's 14:1 and above the 90th percentile there are no remaining female job seekers. People notice things like this -- that none of the available top engineers are women, even though there are still less talented or experienced female applicants. It creates stereotypes. It deprives the women below the 80th percentile of their role models and mentors. People start expecting women to be worse on average, because of those available to hire, Google has actually caused that to be the case.

And things go downhill from there very quickly if more large companies do the same as Google.

[bduerst]

But those are just hypotheticals. Is there actually any evidence showing this happening?

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not a hypothetical, it's arithmetic. The only hypothetical parts are the number of job seekers and the number of hires, but change them to whatever you like, as long as the proportion of women hired is different than it is in the applicant pool the effect still persists.

[dguaraglia]

But isn't that true of any hiring practice? Should people start lowering their standards just so other companies can get better candidates too?

[AnthonyMouse]

It's only true of hiring practices that cause the gender ratio in your company to be different than it is in the industry as a whole.

[fche]

And then watch out if your company bases its diversity targets on numbers from the rest of the industry. All the good ones may be taken (in order to get to the mythical 50%), but now we want to follow suit (to get to 50%), but what's left? What a mess.

[dguaraglia]

This is another of the "facts" that Damore's memo mentions but there's no empirical proof for. Do you have any?

[fche]

Proof for what? Smaller number of available women? That's obvious. That if larger companies hire the best of them, the remaining supply/quality will shrink? That's obvious too.

[dguaraglia]

No, that there's a hard number that Google recruiters are supposed to achieve (50% seems to what I've seen repeated around here.)

Does anyone have any actual proof that Google is aiming for 50% or to represent the general population 1-1?