While I can sympathize with his sentiment, I don't think his example of Ellen Pao is really fair. Here is the quote he used:
‘She has passed on hiring candidates who don’t embrace her priority of building a gender-balanced and multiracial team. “We ask people what they think about diversity, and we did weed people out because of that,” she said.’
To me, that doesn't imply that they are excluding people because they don't fit some diversity quota, but because they don't share the same values. Clearly she cares about building a diverse team, and it only makes sense that she would hire individuals who also see the benefit of that.
Thanks, and fair enough. I've actually read into that before also. I think it's in freakonomics, where they found that if a black person had a typically white name on their resume they'd have more chance of a callback.
I know cultural diversity is a problem, I just don't think that's the way to solve it. Maybe I should have explained that I know everyone doesn't have the same views as myself, I just don't think the equal and opposite views are the way forward.
Unfortunately I'm in no way qualified enough to discuss how to fix it. I think it's an education issue at the ground level.
Education is where the least disparity occurs. Everyone, regardless of demographics, goes to the same lectures, turns in the same projects, takes the same exams, gets graded on the same rubric.
Bias and discrimination creeps in once humans start to make judgments on things that aren't so clear cut. There is no objective scale for a resume, or a conference proposal. People use their intuition and judgment to make decisions about hiring, and speaker selection, and salary offers, and everything else- and that intuition has been shown to be unconsciously biased in many studies, including the ones you referenced.
It's probably very frustrating, as a white male (according to the picture on the article at least), to feel like the deck might be stacked against you in some way, in some situations, at some companies. It's also very frustrating as a minority in a field to know that it is, for it to have been shown to be true both in your own experience and in decades of research.
Solutions are up for debate. No one has the best answer. What is happening is an iterative process towards something that is better, that works for more people, more of the time.
I can understand your argument here, but the problem is essentially that almost nobody is fair (as someone else commented here - that based on biases against cultures they will filter our resumes based on names and such). I also get that you think that the issue is a matter of foundation - since fewer women/minorities are learning to be software developers, fewer of them apply. You're just at the end of the assembly line, not the cause of the problem.
The issue is that while misogyny and racism are no longer institutionally enforced, they are far from dead. There's still deep seeded biases and cultural attitudes that are constantly oppressing women and minorities from succeeding (we can certainly argue how big or small an impact this may be, but it is very certainly there without a doubt). Trying to address the foundation (i.e. schooling of children and their upbringing) is a start, it's just not enough. There needs to be a decelerating force applied at all levels of society to counter act decades of inertia working against women and minorities.
Further, my own personal belief is that 'best for the job' is a loose term, especially in the tech industry. Maybe for something like a fireman that has strict and narrow requirements it's easy to say "you need to be the best" through physical endurance tests, but for something as wide as computer software, best can also be people who are more organized, more loyal to the company, and especially more diverse (in terms of creative power). I think I went off on a tangent at the end here, but I hope you understand my main point, which is - affirmative action may seem very unfair, but it is fair in the larger picture, and hopefully something that can go away soon.