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Comment by michaelgv | Hacker News Reader

I’ve always said to hire the people who can do what we need as a business, regardless of their gender

Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places). So the hard question is, how do you effectively encourage business to choose the best people regardless of gender?

Some have tried blind interviews but these are very hard to do properly and effectively. A 40% quota is another way to push business into looking beyond gender.

Then a minority-only company should be both cheaper and more productive, by supply and demand.

I think there are three potential issues with this, firstly, minorities are being discriminated against and paid less in the scenario so it wouldn't be desirable on that metric. Secondly competition in many markets isn't robust enough to have an even playing field if you wanted to start a new company with all "minorities". Third, if the company was all "minorities" you would be drastically reducing the hiring pool so even with good competition it would be hard to hire well (which could wipe out any minor efficiency gains).

> Which is a noble sentiment but simply doesn't happen in the business world (or in many other places).

On the contrary, all the evidence I've seen points to discrimination being a very small part of the gender pay gap.

The problem is that men and women are different.[1] So it becomes very difficult to even measure if women are being discriminated against much or are just different to men.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/oep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/oep...

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