What? By pulling from a larger pool of candidates, you’re more likely to get someone more skilled.
Do you believe that hiring currently excludes those races and sexes? Because that's explicitly illegal, and has been for a long time
Good lord yes. In software engineering almost everyone is a white male.
Earlier you stated that you don't see them represented in the workforce but that doesn't necessarily imply exclusion by the party doing the hiring. Given what the labor market for dev is like I feel that attributing observations to blatant discrimination should require extensive direct evidence.
Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.
Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.
Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?
That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.
> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.
How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.
They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.