To be fair, I really should have phrased that as: "Now that I've googled "gapjumpers" and seen what it is, I'm very inclined to give far less credence to the c

To be fair, I really should have phrased that as: "Now that I've googled "gapjumpers" and seen what it is, I'm very inclined to give far less credence to the claims of based on work by gapjumpers" The reason I made the jump to putting your name in their is because gapjumpers was your primary reference in a few comments, but no link was provided. I have few doubts that a blind interview process of capable candidates will approximate the base rate of available candidates that participate in the interview process (or mock hiring process for the purpose of demonstrating that a blind interview process eliminates or greatly reduces identity-based biases). I was never debating this claim. Providing references to this claim is tangential to the point I was making. I was debating your original claim. Your original claim: It all looks nice until we get numbers from groups like GapJumpers that institute blind auditions for hiring or performance evaluations where evaluator can't identify what group they are. Starting out, these "fair" companies are usually under 10% minority or women. Once they see only performance, it's suddenly closer to 50/50. Hmm. From what you wrote, I think it's fair to assume that companies exist that implemented blind auditions that are 50/50. Furthermore, since this debate is in the context of tech and because this was a reply to my comment about base rates, I also think it's fair to assume that the companies in question are tech companies. I'm also making a minor assumption that we're talking about engineering positions at these companies since that is where most of the debate regarding the gender ratio is centered at. For non-engineering positions, I've not noticed a huge discrepancy in hiring. At the tech companies where I've worked, the non-technical side of the business is very balanced gender-wise. FWIW the technical recruiting departments responsible for sourcing most of the engineering candidates we interview are mostly women. I don't know if that's important at all, but it's an interesting observation. With those two fair assumptions, both me and the other commenter considered your claim as written to be a very very bold claim. Your claim was tantamount to "blind auditions are a panacea to the gender (or other identity) diversity problem in hiring". Given that claim, that's was we want a citation for. Where are these mythical 50/50 tech companies and how to they achieve 50/50 without being discriminatory when the base rate they are drawing from is approximately 88/12 (the approximate distribution of men to women with CS degrees)? Given this, the "scholarly work and experimental studies" you found are interesting, but not really relevant because I never once challenged what blind auditions can achieve in an academic or experimental setting. I wanted a citation that references the "fair" companies you mentioned. because I was challenging that blind auditions can automagically achieve 50/50 without reverse discrimination in an industry where the population from which you draw candidates is far from 50/50. Had you limited your claim to academic and experimental studies, I wouldn't have challenged it at all. I probably wouldn't even had asked for a reference, since that's not even an extraordinary claim. With respect to your other comments. I'm not sure which claims of mine in particular you're addressing or what anecdote in particular you're talking about. I wrote a lot across several comments. The original claim I made, which was about the relevance of base rates with respect to race didn't require a scholarly citation since I cited the data directly, much of which was US Census data, which is as authoritative as you get for the claim I'm making. For the other references I used, I could try to find the original source material instead of secondary references. Let me know which secondary references you have doubts about and I'd be happy to scrounge up the primary sources so we can debate the likelihood that they are valid. FWIW, I'm 100% in favor of blind auditions. I would love to be able to reduce a candidate's identity down to a hash. I miss the internet back in 1995/6 when the only identity you had online was the one you created for yourself.