They are adding a bias in their selection process with gender diversity programs, so if two candidates are very similar they will probably select the one who belongs to the minority. As it is a minority, you are more likely to choose less qualified people from the minority.
For example, your pool of candidates is 75 (mayority) / 25 (minority). If you want in your company 50/50 ratio, you must leave out better candidates from the mayority in order to increase your number of people of the minority.
EDIT: as other person replied to me in a comment, my argument fails if the target ratio is close to the pool of candidates. But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption. I assume the goal was not feasible and that lead to the famous memorandum.
>But we don't have any reference what was the goal of the diversity program to make any assumption.
In California, when companies are audited by the government to check for discriminatory employment practices, they're checking that the employment ratios are relatively close to the ratio of the pool of applicants, not some prescribed ratio like 50/50.
They sample resumes from various source (online hiring boards, recruiting companies, etc.). They also do compare companies to their industry average for their region to see if a company is hiring abnormally compared to similar companies. Companies with 50 employees have a lot more variation than companies with 1000 employees, they're very aware of the related sampling biases and do the best they can, they employ a good amount of statisticians and sociologists. The margin for error is also quite high, the kind of auditing I'm talking about is meant to catch very serious, long term, company wide systemic discrimination.
After companies grow to a certain size (I think >50 employees), they are also obligated to record demographics information about applicants in the form of voluntary surveys in their application process.
What? As far as I know you shouldn't put your gender, age or photo in the CV because the company who review it can be sued for discrimination. (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies).
Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I am more confuse now after the information you gave me.
> (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies)
funny, when I started applying outside of the US, I added that information into my resume.
in the US, there's often an attached (optional) form that allows the applicant to add this information. I'd never really put it together before tonight, but I've always shunned filling out that form. I also shunned saying the pledge of allegiance in grade school.
wondering, for myself, if those behaviors are related.
>What? As far as I know you shouldn't put your gender, age or photo in the CV because the company who review it can be sued for discrimination. (A recruiter from US made me delete that information when I was applying to us companies).
You're not being misinformed, this is probably good advice.
Your demographic information doesn't have to be on your CV for your name to be cross referenced with a government database (audits I mentioned are done by government offices or government contractors), which you would probably be listed in if you are working in the US.
>Isn't Google ratios similar to Facebook and other companies in San Francisco? (But not to other states).
I haven't read anything about any audits that have said they have a significant bias one way or another, I don't think I've said anything to suggest otherwise.
Google and other large corporations are known to do self audits of their hiring practices (demographic and otherwise) both to improve their hiring processes as well as to identify and correct discriminatory practices (mitigate legal risk), they are allowed to collect demographic information for the latter purpose.[0]
My personal opinion is that Google's demographics changes are a simple result of changes in the actual applicant pool, and that Google 'promoting diversity' doesn't change their internal hiring process in any meaningful way. But the press about it probably does encourage lesser represented people to join CS majors in university. So google does promote diversity in engineering, just not in the way the author of that article suggests, and instead with marketing and a 4 year time lag.
If things keep going this way (esp. in California) someday saying that only women can get pregnant is gonna count as "perpetuating gender stereotypes".
Of course, because a policy of positive discrimination for minorities is not perpetuating any stereotype...
Equality doesn't mean equity. Equality is not fair.
P.S. downvote whatever you want, it is called discrimination for a reason (even if it says positive before)