> You can't have it both ways. You're either based solely on merit, or on merit and how non-male and non-white they are. Which is discrimination.

Actually yes, you can. There are 2 steps in recruiting:

1. Find people who want to apply 2. Have them go through a hiring process to select which one you make an offer

You can seek diversity in step 1 and be completely merit-based on step 2.

If your step 1. is mostly ask your (currently overwhelming white male) engineers for referrals, of course you'll get a bunch of white dudes. You have to find other channels.

Diversity shouldn't be excluding people who happen to be part of the current majority, but enlarging your pool of candidates.

Also, the whole idea of hiring "merit-based" is a bit naive because you're not hiring people on a single objective metric. There are a bunch of metrics, most of them judged subjectively: technical abilities, adaptability, communication abilities, person easy to work with, and the list goes on.

So while Google definitely screwed up by trying to take the easy path to a more diverse workforce, you can seek diversity without excluding white dudes.

>You can seek diversity in step 1 and be completely merit-based on step 2.

What are your feelings on blocking all non diverse applications in step one and allowing only diversity candidates to proceed to step 2?

Yes -- I missed the "pool of candidates" part. I was assuming based on their defensive posture they were referring to the hiring manager dropping resumes of otherwise qualified individuals.

I think the challenge is how to correct for unconscious bias (e.g. the classic NBER finding that "black" names have to send in 150% of the resumes of "white" names to get the same interviews[0]) without over-correcting. When people think they're making objective, merit-based judgements, they are actually being racist, sexist, classist, etc.

So how do you fix this? One way is what you suggested: "companies ... should be completely blind to their workforce's background. This is doable in the interview process; for example a test which results in an offer if passed. (Though normal interview processes are not like this.)

But recruiting is more difficult, because right it involves humans reaching out to other humans who they judge to be a good fit. So being truly merit-based there requires some correction of one's own intuition.

I mean, if recruiters were really instructed to "purge the hiring pool" of non-diverse candidates then that's obviously pretty blatant. But I just wanted to note that being 100% merit-based is not easy.

[0] http://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/w9873.html

Trying to find a diverse pool is fine. You can recruit at historically black colleges, you can offer benefits like family leave or daycare that might appeal statistically more to women. You can try to show that your organization is not racist and will be welcoming to people of color.

It is fine to try and attract a diverse group of applicants, but after they apply, the basis of hiring should be who is qualified.

Yes, I agree. Perhaps I was not clear that this is what I meant.

Good luck defining and hiring purely on merit. Good luck separating merit from unconscious biases related to where you've seen merit previously. And typically most of what you've seen previously is people like you.

I've seen plenty of excellent computer engineers who started out as physics majors, or astronomers, or music majors...but they were universally white men (mostly because I've only ever been around white men in this business).

If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere?

I suspect the latter.

> If a black woman came to me with a background in East Asian linguistics, would I naturally associate her with the success stories I've seen, or would I think she's unqualified and needs to get more experience elsewhere? > I suspect the latter.

Really? And you would not think that of a white candidate?

Frankly, I would be intrigued by anyone with a background in East Asian linguistics who taught themselves programming, and would be very careful not to quickly discount them.

Completely agree about missing the actual benefit to society of focusing on better education and opportunities for all. Amazing how quickly things can go off the rails when you start evaluating middle management off some metric like "number of diversity hires" which seems like a good idea but then backfires into something ridiculous like this. I hope this sets a fire under Google's management to keep better track of HR

Problem is that leaving companies open to lawsuits from individuals, organizations like the NAACP, and even from the DoJ.

Whenever the demographics of a company do not match the demographics makeup of society at large, then the company is legally on the defensive. And the fines can be BIG