> It is you who obsesses over gender I'm afraid, not me. What I am saying is that as the hirer, you are able to give someone a chance. Therefore, you can look at the potential of your candidates, rather than accomplishments. You can also look at how much you can afford a wrong hire, because it is a risk, sure.

It was ambiguous whether or not you were advocating for using gender as a proxy for "better culture fit". The GP was just being explicit that that's a bad idea.

> Knowing that people from group X (be they women, men, minorities, people from poor background without access to networks) on average are going to need bit more help than people from the right background, the right education, the right everything, that is something you can use in order to a) be the change you want to see b) run the risk of fresh ideas in your org.

It seems like you're actually arguing for using gender, race, etc as a proxy for "better culture fit" or "fresh ideas". This is illegal in most civilized places as it's immoral and based on dubious assumptions (notably that there is more inter-group intellectual diversity than intra-group diversity, i.e., all men (or women, or whites, or asians, or etc) are the roughly same).