[Manuel_D]

The fact that the company is majority white does not make discrimination legal. If the Perkins Coie wants to do things like anonymize its interviews, or send fake interview packets to its recruiters and looking for disparities in call back rates then that would be a genuine attempt at identifying potential discrimination.

[phillmv]

the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.

[Manuel_D]

> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating?

This is untrue, though. The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population is not evidence of discrimination.

In fact, you can end up with disparities much larger without discrimination. It's even possible to actively discriminate against a group, and still have that disadvantaged group be overrepresented by a factor of 3 or 4.

That was the case with the Harvard admissions lawsuit. Even though the university was actively discriminating against Asian applicants, the undergrad population was ~20% Asian, despite ~6% of the applicants being Asian.

[phillmv]

>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

[Manuel_D]

Yes, it is possible to have an 80% white organization without discrimination. Perkins Coie is ~80% white but is gender representation is much closer to parity [1], so I'm not sure why you're referring specifically to "white guys".

The relevance of SFFA vs. Harvard is to demonstrate that it's possible to have a substantial overrepresentation - over 3x in the case of Asians at Harvard - despite actively discriminating against the overrepresented group. Whites are only ~1.2x more common at Perkins Coie relative to the general population.

You can keep repeating the line that because a company has X% of Y race it must be evidence of discrimination as many times as you want, repetition doesn't make it true.

1. https://perkinscoie.com/about-us

[phillmv]

not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.

i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.

[Manuel_D]

If you did a cursory review of the social sciences on this topic, you'd know that the demographics of people going through the prerequisites to working at a place like Perkins Coie does not match the general population. College attendance has racial disparities, as does law school attendance. Whites have half and 1/3rd the fail rate at the bar examination as compared to Latin and Black people respectively. Even absent discrimination, there are plenty of factors that drive law firms to have larger representation of white people.

[bigstrat2003]

> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating.

That is not remotely true. Individual choices, as well as experiences which shape the candidate pool, can cause such lopsided numbers. In my view, the single biggest problem with the (quite well intentioned) diversity initiatives is that they assume, without evidence, that any organization with lopsided demographics must therefore be discriminating. But that is a fallacy and undermines the entire endeavor they are engaged in.

[phillmv]

there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.

i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.

[Manuel_D]

What is the evidence? Did we send identical applications, differing only by ethnicity, to Perkins Coie, and did they respond to the non-white applicants at lower rates? Did Perkins Coie institute policies like withholding bonuses if leaders hired too few white applicants? What indicates that Perkins Coie is preferring white applicants over equally qualified Black or Latin applicants?

You insist there's evidence of discrimination, but all you've done is point to the % of white people at the company and insist it's too high.

But as a counterpoint, 40% of the developers at my company are Asian, despite them making up 6% of the US population. That's an overrepresentation of over 6X. In fact, whites are slightly underrepresented. Does that mean we're discriminating against non-asians? Is this evidence that whites are discriminated again, on account of their underrepresentation? Of course not.

[thegrimmest]

This is absurd. Why is it possible to end up with a majority black, tall, male, NBA team without pre-selecting on basis of race, height, or sex?