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You can address an unbalanced hiring pool of qualified candidates (i.e. your 90%) by expanding the hiring pool (through various methods) until its balance comes

You can address an unbalanced hiring pool of qualified candidates (i.e. your 90%) by expanding the hiring pool (through various methods) until its balance comes closer to the balance of the overall population. Doing this doesn't require discriminating against anyone. See https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-valley-google-diversity-black-women-workers https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/aug/07/silicon-v... for example, there are other tech companies with race balance much closer to national averages. It's certainly possible to pull more women and people of color into your hiring pool, and you don't ever need to turn down a single person based on their white skin color to do it. The universities you hire from and your degree requirements for applicants can both have a significant impact on things and it's easy to adjust those. The downside is that some qualified candidates (white man and woman of color alike) will potentially miss out on jobs once the candidate pool is grown, because you've pulled a bunch of extremely talented people into the pool who set the bar higher. That could certainly make people feel discriminated against if they don't have enough insight into the process.

_justinfunk 9y ago
I think we are circling the drain of the right approach to this problem. If Google's pool of qualified candidates were a "proper" mix of diversity, then I don't think they would need to have the practices outlined in the manifesto. So encouraging women to get into STEM and to facilitate pulling talent from around the globe to get them into the pool of candidates is 100% the right move to address the diversity issue. BUT, if women don't come in the numbers you need them to and your international outreach yields mostly asians... what do you do?
panda88888 9y ago
Or Google can reduce the overrepresented candidate pool to match that of underrepresented by randomly select the appropriate number of candidates from the overrepresented (i.e. Randomly reject, lol). This should have no effect on te bar each candidate is expected to pass, underrepresented or not. Interestingly this hypothetical scenario would probably increase the false negative rate for overrepresented applicants due to random rejection, which effective lowers false negative rate for underrepresented applicants relative to the overrepresented.

_justinfunk 9y ago

I think we are circling the drain of the right approach to this problem. If Google's pool of qualified candidates were a "proper" mix of diversity, then I don't think they would need to have the practices outlined in the manifesto. So encouraging women to get into STEM and to facilitate pulling talent from around the globe to get them into the pool of candidates is 100% the right move to address the diversity issue. BUT, if women don't come in the numbers you need them to and your international outreach yields mostly asians... what do you do?

panda88888 9y ago

Or Google can reduce the overrepresented candidate pool to match that of underrepresented by randomly select the appropriate number of candidates from the overrepresented (i.e. Randomly reject, lol). This should have no effect on te bar each candidate is expected to pass, underrepresented or not. Interestingly this hypothetical scenario would probably increase the false negative rate for overrepresented applicants due to random rejection, which effective lowers false negative rate for underrepresented applicants relative to the overrepresented.