[notzuck]

She literally said she gets applications from a demographic that she doesn't want to hire from.... am I missing something here? You can't just say I have too many Asians and therefore would prefer to have my applicants not be Asian.

[ceejayoz]

If she literally says that, please quote it.

[notzuck]

"we realized that the demographics of people we attract to apply are not inline with the demographics of the people we hope to hire."

I already quoted....

[ceejayoz]

That quote does not support your statement "She literally said she gets applications from a demographic that she doesn't want to hire from...". She did not literally (or even figuratively) say anything of the sort.

"We'd like a more diverse pool of applicants" does not mean "we'd like a pool of applicants with zero of <over-represented demographic> in it".

It doesn't even mean they want less of that demographic at all. It can (and likely should) be read as wanting a larger applicant pool overall, adding in folks from demographics who simply aren't applying currently.

[notzuck]

"We'd like a more diverse pool of applicants" does not mean "we'd like a pool of applicants with zero of <over-represented demographic> in it".

Are you sure about that? I don't think this is about equality at all. It's about her and her agenda. Forcing people into your pipeline to meet a soft quota is silly.

[ceejayoz]

> Are you sure about that?

Yes.

If I look at my garden, and I say "gee, it's all yellow flowers... I'd like some red and purple ones, too", it's kinda nutty to think I'm saying "I'm going to rip out all the yellow flowers and burn them".

[notzuck]

But you'll stop growing yellow ones so now when a yellow comes to your job interview you may turn that flower down purely based on race which is wrong. It's illegal to discriminate purely on someones race. If I would have otherwise hired you but I 'need' more red flowers then that's bad.

[human20190310]

I'm assuming "the demographics of the people we hope to hire" means demographics that match the population at large. They should have been more clear about what that meant.

Nevertheless, if the demographic profile of their hires doesn't correspond to the demographics of the population they're embedded in, it's reasonable to question whether 1) they're unfairly excluding people and 2) the extent to which the people they're excluding could have contributed.

[notzuck]

I'm not sure what % of the population or wordpress user population is trans. Do we need to match the population in the first place? What if trans people just don't want to work for Automattic?

[ceejayoz]

> What if trans people just don't want to work for Automattic?

That's why they're doing the survey? To find out if that's true, and if so, why it's true?

> Do we need to match the population in the first place?

If trans folks have statistically similar job abilities to non-trans folks, a disparity in hiring may indicate some other discriminatory / disparate factors that can be fixed. They might even be entirely unintentional.

That's why you do the research.

[human20190310]

> Do we need to match the population in the first place?

The extent to which things don't match is worth looking into. Historically such mismatches have more often been due to unequal opportunity than to other causes.