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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

It turns out that the reason is that screening for basic math competency could be discrimination, because it reduces the chance of hiring for minorities who do less well at math testing.

If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.

artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.

Eroding meritocracy is ultimately bad for everyone. It's through climbing meritocratic ladders that minority groups throughout history have raised their prospects.

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While it's clearly not genuinely discriminatory to filter people based on math skills, this is something that gets pushed internally at some companies by the people they hire to improve their diversity. They see that the people they "want to hire" can't pass some standard so they call it discriminatory. It's an easy way for them to show "success".

They see that the people they "want to hire" can't pass some standard so they call it discriminatory.

It's as if they think people can't do math based on ethnicity. Those people are the true racists.

If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.

But you can still be challenged to prove in court that it's not only not directly racist, but also actually useful and related to the job requirements. Which can get expensive.

> If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.

Lets say that Google added a test for its engineers, that screened for writing and communication skills. Think, SAT verbal questions or something. And lets say that it just so happens that women are a lot better at SAT verbal questions than men.

Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?

I don’t see a problem with that as long as everyone takes the same test. An individual’s skills are not bound by the race and gender to which they belong.

Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?

My verbal scores happened to be better than my math scores on both the SAT and the GRE, so I'd be all for this! Someone did a study in the 80's that suggested that programmers had to do more interaction involving details than other jobs. Good verbal abilities are going to help out, in my view.

This is not analogous to OP without the additional detail that communication skills are 'clearly needed' in the job.

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