[davidhansen]

This is not a political site so I'm not going to debate the merits/drawbacks of outlawing bigotry in hiring practices.

But one thing that ought to be pointed out is that free markets tend to punish companies, over the long term, that intentionally deny themselves access to talent due to bigotry. Conversely, companies who acquire talent with rational screening procedures will have a competitive advantage over those who use irrational screening procedures.

It's a sort of corporate karma. In aggregate, bigotry in hiring procedures will eventually harm you, legal or not.

[hack_edu]

The notion that the long term will harm them is a bit out of scope. Being a startup, a YC one at that, you can assume they see no significant long term for the company anyway, and hope for an acquisition before their idealized startup culture dream is popped.

[irahul]

> free markets tend to punish companies, over the long term, that intentionally deny themselves access to talent due to bigotry. Conversely, companies who acquire talent with rational screening procedures will have a competitive advantage over those who use irrational screening procedures.

That sounds a lot like fair world fallacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-world_hypothesis

[jessedhillon]

Evidence? I know free market theory sounds like the most plainly obvious, common sense set of statements but you still have to justify your conclusions. You are asserting without proof that the market is full of completely rational agents.

[dantheman]

It's not that markets are completely rational at all, it comes from supply and demand. If you exclude a large portion of your supply the price will go up. For example, if I only higher people greater than 6 feet at my company, and my competitor doesn't care about height -- the wages will be lower, unless of course tall people are the cheapest to hire already.

[davidhansen]

I am not asserting that the market is full of completely rational agents. I am asserting that voluntarily excluding yourself from a resource pool or limiting your access to a resource pool will decrease your likelihood of success.

To give an analogy, if you have access to all the food you want, but you voluntarily limit yourself to kumquats and bananas for arbitrary, irrational reasons, in the long run you will develop health problems.

Likewise, a business that irrationally limits itself to a subset of all available talent will, in aggregate, lose out to those who are not thus limited.

I admit to not having citations of statistical evidence at hand, although I have seen many publications in the past that indicate diversity of employee populations is correlated with innovation and success. I did not provide evidence because I believe as a Gedankenexperiment, the conclusion is self-evident.

[pyre]

  > one thing that ought to be pointed out is that free
  > markets tend to punish companies, over the long term,
  > that intentionally deny themselves access to talent
  > due to bigotry.

If this happens on a large enough scale, then it's hard to quantify. If this happens enough that it keeps the number of women in tech low, then how can you really quantify what they are missing out on? It would be easier to quantify if there was a large number of skilled female programmers, but if they are discouraged from even reaching the point of becoming skilled/competent programmers...

[chc]

This assumes that talented programmers of each sex exist in fixed quantities. That isn't how the real world works. In reality, if you make women feel unwelcome in programming, many who would have been good programmers will just go into different fields, so the entire market ends up losing access to their talent.

[jaylevitt]

"free markets tend to punish companies, over the long term, that intentionally deny themselves access to talent due to bigotry."

If this were true, we wouldn't have needed the EEOC and the Civil Rights Act in the first place. We did. Therefore.