[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.