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> And let us be clear that, yes, such policies mean every once in a while you will not hire the most skilled person for a job. Therefore, a value judgement must

• OscarCunningham 9y ago
  What if you do that and the number of women in the orchestra shrinks?
  • axlprose 9y ago
    Or even if the number of women just stays the same. Is the effort to level the playing field then deemed a 'failure' if the results don't change in the way they're expected to? That's the important question here, especially since there have now been preliminary experiments in tech interviews suggesting such an outcome is not implausible: http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mask-gender-in-technical-interviews-heres-what-happened/ http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
    • mathw 9y ago
      If you've removed possible bias from your hiring process, then you have to accept an imbalance is either a result of uneven retention inclusive-or something operating earlier in the process of training your candidates. The point is to remove as many obstacles as possible. We want the best to get the jobs, but if the are barriers based on gender or race or religion that's potentially denying us a brilliant woman, or black man, or Muslim. It doesn't necessarily mean you end up at 50/50, I'm quite willing to accept that the sexes might be biologically different in brain structure and that this might mean one sex might have different average aptitudes, but I won't accept a societal construct on top of that. You should never hear that someone shouldn't try to do something because of their sex. Never. Well unless it involves the more obvious anatomical differences. The average man is going to have some difficulty becoming an effective wet nurse.
      • OscarCunningham 9y ago
        If 50/50 isn't the target, how will we know when we get there?
        • tednoob 9y ago
          Do you have to know the target? Correct for bias you have, then question what it is upstream that is creating that bias.
          • OscarCunningham 9y ago
            How do we correct for the bias if we don't know what the unbiased state would look like?
            • PeterisP 9y ago
              You ensure a fair process (without attempting to overcompensate/correct for other processes out of your control), and whatever comes out is the unbiased state. You can't escape the fact that (assuming any innate differences whatsoever) equality of opportunity will mean unequal outcomes, and equality of outcomes requires unequal opportunities.
            • tednoob 9y ago
              Frankly I do not see how 50/50, or any fixed number, can be a representation of the unbiased state. The unbiased state is unknown. If you look at what the orchestra did and remove factors you know are irrelevant for the applicants then you should move towards a more unbiased state independent of what the number actually is. The problem is to find out what bias you have. One way is to compare the people who apply with the people you hire. You can see what traits you select on, then you can decide if you think those traits are good or bad.
            • AnthonyMouse 9y ago
              > How do we correct for the bias if we don't know what the unbiased state would look like? The goal isn't to choose some specific gender balance and then take whatever steps necessary to produce it, it's to eliminate unfair bias. The way to do that is to find it, not indirectly by looking at ratios, but directly by actually finding it. High school teachers who say things like "women are no good at computers" to young women should be reprimanded etc. Poll women who didn't go into tech and ask them why not, and if any of the reasons are unjust then change them. If no one can find anything like that then the gender balance at that point is what it's supposed to be. We're obviously not there yet, but the way we know is because we keep finding things like that, not because the gender balance is uneven.
• tednoob 9y ago
  Google are countering an existing bias by hiring people contrary to the bias. The orchestra is removing the bias. Is it possible for Google to remove bias? Isn't the real problem further upstream? I bet that if you look at all applicants applying for jobs at Google you will see the same skew as Google have in their offices already.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• jdoliner 9y ago
  In no company in the world is this a "diversity policy." Diversity policies are the exact opposite of this. If they were as you describe, I'm sure the the author of the memo, and everyone who agrees with it, would be completely in support of them.
  • Tarean 9y ago
    There are companies that strip personally identifying information from the resume in the first few phases and iirc diversitiy did go up. Been a while since I read about it so I don't recall thr complete details but there is a radio lab episode about it.
    • CrystalLangUser 9y ago
      This year, GitHub did that for a conference, letting people submit talks and compete for selection completely stripped of identifying info. The only people selected were men. That conference was canceled because it didn’t stand with Github’s stance on diversity, etc. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868 — Companies actively do the exact opposite because they need/want more diversity. It’s absolutely not like the music world where a large amount of women play instruments... the number of women in CS professionally is low. The number of female CS graduates is and has been low. Simply stripping info doesn’t mean anything if at the end of the day a diversity agenda has to be met.
      • occultist_throw 9y ago
        That also depends on how many submitted talks. It would be a farce and ridiculous if 100 talks were submitted, and 99 of them were <gasp> males, and then they shut down and complain because no females were chosen. It's called statistics.
        • alkonaut 9y ago
          This is why in the face of that kind of odds, a diverse conference has to look very hard for female speakers. Even if there are factors that mean there will never be 50% female submitters, a proper diversity policy means the organizer sees this as a symptom of a problem they can help solve. Perhaps if a conference can keep at least 1/3 female speakers every year then 25% of submissions will be from women in 10 years? And perhaps if 1/3 speakers are women, more women will visit the conference, widening the audience? The whole point of active diversity policy is that the status quo is to be changed by active means.
• ramblerman 9y ago
  But that is the exact opposite of what is happening with positive discrimination and probably something the initial author would prefer.
• Trundle 9y ago
  The curtain has been tried. It didn't get the desired results so was retired. http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888?pfmredir=sm http://mobile.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-t...
• memedtodeath 9y ago
  When the Australian public service experimented with blinding demographic data on resumes, fewer women and minorities were hired: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-trial-to-improve-gender-equality-failing-study/8664888 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tria... A blind recruiting process only increases diversity if there exists significant bias against diverse candidates. I wouldn't be surprised if Silicon Valley has a bias in favor of diverse candidates, like Australia's public service.
  • tepe1 9y ago
    You wouldn't be surprised because that's exactly what you want to believe. It's so funny: the more things change. For decades we've been hearing arguments about why women can't go to college, shouldn't vote, can't serve in the military, can't become doctors, can't become lawyers, won't make good judges, can't be a CEO, don't have what ot takes to do science. Every one of these idiotic arguments have proven false. And yet nothing has changed. Here we are in 2017 with many holding out that software engineering -- a trivial pursuit that mostly involves sticking crap in databases written by real computer scientists -- is somehow special. Most women just don't have what it takes. What it really demonstrates is that stupid people will cling to the status quo. In 25 years when in fact the majority of developers are women (because in fact we often see women dominate collaborative knowledge-driven fields) these arguments will look just as silly as the arguments that no woman could ever perform surgery without fainting.
  • manicdee 9y ago
    Note that men and women typically present themselves differently on CVs and in selection criteria, with men typically giving themselves credit for work done in teams while women typically talk about the teams they were part of. This would easily explain why blind resumes resulted in a larger proportion of men being selected. edit: to contrast with the orchestra scenario, a resume is not a skill test, while an audition for an orchestra is a skill test for exactly the type of skill that the candidate is being chosen for.
    • mpweiher 9y ago
• gambiting 9y ago
  There was an argument made about it some time ago, that in 19th century playing music was an excellent education for a lady, so thousands if not hundreds of thousands of women had to take piano/violin/flute lessons and become skilled at playing music. Yet that time period has yielded close to zero great women musicians/composers, even though the society has pushed them at a disproportional rate to pursue music playing. Obviously there are other factors here, like the expectation that a woman is a housewife first even if she can play music really well. It's an interesting debate I think.
• dsfjksdf 9y ago
  There is also the study where they changed peoples voices in phone interviews, and the women with male voice were suddenly less likely to be hired (although the effect was small, iirc).
• TeMPOraL 9y ago
  The equivalent of your example in tech industry leads to number of men in software growing - which is precisely what diversity policies try to counter.
• alkonaut 9y ago
  These are perhaps best seen as two different things. Anonymizing applications will prevent discrimination/prejudice. This is objectively a good thing. It's not controversial in any way. An active diversity goal in hiring must go one step further and mean you see diversity of the group as a goal in itself - which, as he says, often means you some times hire a less strong individual. This is the controversial part. But let's remember that the goal of recruiting is not to hire the strongest candidate but to make the company successful. If you buy into the argument that diversity has a value, such as that a diverse company is better at making products for a diverse audience, or that diversity creates a better work environment and therefore higher productivity - then hiring a female candidate over a better make one can make sense.