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Comment by CryoLogic | Hacker News Reader

I'm very interested in seeing how this case pans out, seeing that he cited "favoring women" as a criteria.

In many courts, similar cases like this have been laughed off. In today's world, in many established companies the gender bias (female given priority) is a real form of discrimination. At my University (a top 10), the average female graduates where picked off by Google, MS and the likes - the extremely hard working, talented and passionate grads (male) couldn't even get interviews at big G half the time.

It's an interesting world we live in, where discrimination is now being fought with discrimination.

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I've heard rumors that management have set quotas and/or increased monetary incentives for recruiting women at some of the big companies. I have no evidence though.

I've also heard of review manipulation to "rebalance" the buckets if the numbers appear to demonstrate bias.

Anyway, Marissa is certifiably idiotic for adopting the GE/Microsoft stack rank system.

There are companies with a form of quotas. I won't say which, but they exist. I've known places that require a certain number of resumes from women and minorities (a separate number for each) that must be received and considered for every job opening.

Google's defense is probably algorithmic.

I don't know if it could be blamed on an algorithm. Some of the companies (MS was one) even hosted parties for the female members of IEEE and ACM. Took them out to their campus, free meals, mock interviews, free swag, networking events. But they where female only events.

I'm not a lawyer, but I'm fairly certain you can't blame an algorithm for your hiring practices being discriminatory. Ultimately humans decide to use an algorithm or not.

Even if it's algorithmic someone manually wrote it and would have set a preference to the female gender.

then the court would have to actually look at the obfuscated code to prove the point.

Interestingly, Google, and the other companies, may be seeking out females in an effort to compensate for under representation among their ranks of current employees.

I've heard that African-Americans can't be racist because that's a position of abusing power or something. Is it also said that it is a contradiction in terms to discriminate against men?

The analagous position (not that i endorse either) would be that discrimination against men isn't sexism because men are in the dominant position, not that it is impossible to discriminate against men.

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