4 ms·

I agree with your point but this statement. >You want diverse candidates to win the positions fair and square and thereby command the respect of the rest of th

• wfo 11y ago
  "Skills and qualifications" are often vague and amorphous. Look at tech. We are very bad at detecting who is good and who is not. You can easily weed out completely unqualified candidates and nobody is suggesting you hire them, but hiring isn't a deterministic procedure that selects the candidate with the highest 'qualifications' whatever that even means (would you like an algorithm that blindly selects the highest GPA in CS at the most prestigious school every time?) The argument that people actually make which is not your ridiculous straw man is that if two candidates seem roughly equally competent (which happens almost every single time hiring occurs), and one is from an underrepresented group, and your workforce lacks in diversity, you should select the one from the underrepresented group. As it turns out very often "skills and qualifications" is often used as a code word much like "culture fit" for "the two candidates are functionally indistinguishable, but candidate A just 'seems' smarter, you know? Because, well, white men are smarter, you know?"