> It was pointed out in this thread many times: one good way to approximate what the ratio should be at the point of hire is the ratio among CS graduates. Whil

> It was pointed out in this thread many times: one good way to approximate what the ratio should be at the point of hire is the ratio among CS graduates. While this sounds reasonable on the face of it the reality is different. Where are you sourcing these graduates from? In the USA computer science departments are barely above 10% women faculty, in China it's closer to 40%. Student numbers tell a similar story... so it matters where your graduates are coming from. For a multinational like Google this is a real question. > If you force it to be say 70-30 then you are discriminating against men based on sex. This is a loaded statement, based on the assumpions that (a) hiring if left alone is broadly meritocratic and (b) quotas are the only game in town. There's enough evidence to say that neither of those assumptions is true. First of all, it's been proven many times that bias in hiring is a real problem and has a large effect. Hiring is not meritocratic. Second, Google doesn't use quotas, no bar-lowering occurs (Damore hinted at this but gave no specifics and no evidence... we have to reasonably discount it unless someone can prove otherwise). Instead diversity programs mainly exist around sourcing and trying to avoid false negatives in order to counteract systemic biases. (Disclaimer, I work in this field and have written on this topic before: https://medium.com/finding-needles-in-haystacks/we-need-to-talk-about-james-2ca1143dbae4 https://medium.com/finding-needles-in-haystacks/we-need-to-t...) [edited to remove some text from parent post accidentally left at the end]