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Comment by xg15 | Hacker News Reader

I think what you can reasonably do is to monitor how many employees of a certain race/gender/etc are in a particular job - and if the distribution is significantly unlike the general distribution of the population, see that as an indicator that something is wrong.

That doesn't mean that try the first available thing to "fix" the distribution, but it would be a good starting point to ask further questions why it is so skewed - and then try to identify root causes.

I.e., if you only hire by skills and then find that you still hire 80% men, even though they only make up 50% of the population, then obviously something else is going wrong. The question is what.

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Continuing this line of thought:

- I feel like you'd have to compare demographics of your successful applicants to something more specific than general population. Maybe demographics of your applicant pool?

- What do you do if the root cause turns out to be "upstream" of your company's hiring process, e.g., social conditioning from a young age throughout education that introduces disparities in field of study across demographic categories?

> - What do you do if the root cause turns out to be "upstream" of your company's hiring process, e.g., social conditioning from a young age throughout education that introduces disparities in field of study across demographic categories?

Yes, absolutely. It's a large-scale problem and probably has to be solved at a societal level.

You first have to determine if that really is a problem though. And put evidence forth before you start to actively discriminate.

> I think what you can reasonably do is to monitor how many employees of a certain race/gender/etc are in a particular job

Obviously we can do that technically but maybe we shouldn't. We did monitor it and that lead to people having some most arcane conclusions they derived from this data.

If you hire 80% for IT tech jobs, you probably just hire the average available on the job market. Some deduced this has to be discrimination and maliciously smeared the whole industry. This should not be repeated.

So no, people maybe should keep their ethnicity private if they don't want it to be abused by busy bodies making everyone's live worse.

> if the distribution is significantly unlike the general distribution of the population, see that as an indicator that something is wrong.

most technical roles are >80% men (e.g., google) but companies don't provide breakdowns by functional roles to avoid conversation with people who think like this.

are you ageist if 12% of your talent isn't above the age of 60? once you open a debate about available talent, it ceases to be a useful metric.

this is not even something necessarily wrong in your hiring policy or even in your industry. you could have lower numbers of certain groups because other industries or companies are carrying out discrimination in favour of those groups.

Kindergarten teachers also. Almost 100% women. What is wrong with this world?

So if the local daycare is staffed by all women there's something wrong? Thus, diversity hire to the rescue?

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