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Comment by ShannonAlther | Hacker News Reader

As many people have pointed out before, making the hiring process blind doesn't do what you seem to think it'll do. There was a famous study (can't find it right this second on mobile) where researchers found that the ratio of black hires to white hires decreased when their resumes were submitted with all identifying information scrubbed.

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The results of studies like this depend strongly on the context... both the method used, and the existing hiring environment you're comparing to.

We've run a similar study and for the company we were hiring into we found blinding in that specific case had no effect on race or gender but drastically improved socio-economic diversity. The hiring company already had equitable hiring on gender & the candidate group wasn't racially diverse enough to make a conclusion.

Would I generalise that result to all organisations? No way, and neither should you.

If you can find the study you're thinking of I'd be interested to look at it.

Well, orchestras introduced blinded auditions in the 1970s, when there very few women, and now women are the majority in most orchestras.

So why do you think there is such a disparity in outcome?

I don't know the answer but if I cared to guess, it might be because the talent pool for orchestra performers had significantly more gender parity than the talent pool competing for elite engineering jobs at Google.

Edit: Google says that their diversity platform is non-discriminatory because they're not changing their standards, but rather looking harder for qualified diversity candidates (paraphrasing). This makes the gargantuan and probably unwarranted assumption that there are a lot of these candidates not applying and that 'looking harder' will find them.

Maybe there is pressure to hire from minority groups then. It makes sense that minority candidates are on average less qualified objectively if there is an affirmative action earlier in the process (for example at school admission level).

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