Hm, I suppose that if the goal is to hire solely based on qualifications (and what salaries people are willing to work for, but that might be part of "qualific

Hm, I suppose that if the goal is to hire solely based on qualifications (and what salaries people are willing to work for, but that might be part of "qualifications"?), and qualifications (and prices) are equally distributed among genders among applicants, that the number of persons hired of each gender would be roughly proportional to the number of applicants of each gender. (Wow that sentence that I just wrote sure was a run-on sentence. I hope it isn't too too badly worded.) One might consider other motivations. Is it possible that the proportion of applicants of each gender is influenced by the proportion of persons of each gender of those who are employed in the industry in question? (E.g. maybe persons are less likely to apply for a job if they know that their gender is in the minority in either the industry in general, or in the specific company? I don't claim that this is the case, but it does not seem fundamentally absurd.) If this does turn out to be the case, there might be a positive feedback loop on the difference in ratios of genders, causing a small initial disparity to have a tendency to get larger over time. Would this be a problem? I don't know. It could be fine I guess. It also seems plausible that this could cause some disadvantages as well. I don't know that any would be significant. So, uh, it seems like the question is: Is there an /unfortunate/ cause for significantly unequal proportions of genders in applicants for an industry, and if there is, and if changing hiring practices could "counteract" that in some way, should they prioritize , I guess you could call it fairness to the individual, or should they prioritize addressing some sense of "fairness" to groups as a whole? I think this is a difficult question? One question might be whether there is an obligation to do either. (Note: I do not mean a legal obligation.) If someone wants to hire only, say, left handed people, or only men on odd days of the month and only women on even days of the month, or only people who went to the same college as them, is there a reason they shouldn't do that? Maybe. It seems reasonable to me that both of the options I mentioned regarding gender would be better (in the current climate) than , for example, having a policy of only hiring males, even if it is ok to have a policy of only hiring males. (I also don't know why one would have such a policy, and I think that such a policy would likely be wrong, but if it isn't wrong, I still think the other two things mentioned would both be better than it.) Hmm.