[oellegaard]

I think most people got this topic wrong, maybe because of all the promotion of women in IT, which mostly is good.

If I was a woman, I'd rather apply for someone looking for a developer, than someone looking for a woman - because then I knew I was hired because of my skills and personality - not my gender.

In legal terms, this is pretty much what you can do. You can hire a "person" not a person of a specific gender.

[jasonlotito]

The issue is wanting a diverse work force. They want the benefits that a diverse work force can provide, and that includes adding women to the team [1].

So how do they hire for that without discriminating? I think it's a fair question, and one that shouldn't be ignored out of some perceived bias.

1. http://www.ncwit.org/ncwit-fact-sheet

[bcoates]

You can want a diverse work force all you like but you aren't entitled to one. It's really quite simple, in America an employer doesn't get to pick the gender of his employees. Not to make it all one gender, not for diversity, not to have an exact 50-50 ratio, not to have all the typists be women and all the filers be men or vice versa.

In other words, you don't get to "add women to the team" because it's not your decision to make. If you're worried that your hiring process is biased against women, you're allowed to bend over backwards to make your job offers accessible to them, and go out of your way to make sure your workplace is not intolerable to whatever women work there already.

[jasonlotito]

> You can want a diverse work force all you like but you aren't entitled to one.

Of course. No one is suggesting otherwise. That's not the point. At all. You are the only one talking about entitlement in this context.

[f18]

Exactly. It's almost like you don't know what you don't know -- I couldn't guess what companies are missing by being homogenous.