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Comment by Manuel_D | Hacker News Reader

In-group preferences. Granted, there are non-discriminatory explanations: say your manager just happens to know a lot of potential referrals that are of the same identity group. This is totally plausible, most people do indeed tend to have more social connections with people sharing identity characteristics. It's hard to know for sure if favoritism is happening.

The way to tell would be to send effectively identical resumes differing only in the identity characteristics of the applicant and observing if there are disparities. Of course, most companies aren't interested in doing this: why would a company want to incriminate itself?

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It should be noted that even if there is a non-discriminatory explanation, it is still illegal under the disparate impact legal theory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

Not exactly, as per your link:

> ...an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class...

Requiring doctors to have an MD is going to have a disparate impact on all sorts of factors, including protected classes. Likewise, an anonymized leetcode question isn't going to pass candidates uniformly across identities. But there's a pretty strong case that the use of such measures is justified.

Prioritizing candidates with a referral might be argued to be a disparate impact without justification, and that's somewhere there might be a stronger case but it's not so clear cut.

Notably, "justification" is an affirmative defense (they don't have to prove you were unjustified - you have to prove you were justified. Guilty until proven innocent, in other words), and in practice must meet a very high bar - e.g. Griggs v. Duke Power Co., that started all this, ruled that an IQ test for management positions is not justified. More recently, a test for teachers where Whites had a higher pass rate than Blacks or Latinos (no word on Asians) was also ruled unjustified:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-latino-teachers-collectin...

A controversial ruling, especially given how prevalent exams are for employment: MD, JD for lawyers, heck even a bachelor's degree is a disparate impact. Notably, one of the lawyers who helped overturn Brown vs Board of Education (now a judge) ruled in favor of New York in a lower court: https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-education/the-teach...

Do you have evidence that in-group preferences are happening? Your workplace becoming more diverse is not proof of in-group preferences.

The situation laid out in the comment above is that of a workplace becoming less and less diverse, not more.

The situation did not make it clear one way or another. Probably on purpose.

> ...along the lines of: <person_with_specific attribute> becoming a manager, then every one on the team slowly being replaced with <person_with_specific attribute>...

The commenter made it clear the team is becoming not just less diverse, but completely homogenous: "every one on the team" sharing the same identity characteristic as the lead.

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