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Comment by mzw_mzw | Hacker News Reader

> US corporations have a multi-hundred year history of using thinly veiled proxies for race as part of their hiring practices. This continues to this day, including in the tech industry.

That's a pretty serious accusation, one that could spark a lot of successful lawsuits against those companies -- especially in the current political climate in the states they tend to be located in. Do you have any specific evidence to back it up?

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Google won't you apply to work there without giving your college GPA, despite the fact that all the academic research, and also their own internal research, shows that GPA doesn't correlate at all with job performance.

C.f. what Malcom Gladwell has to say about this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLQC3EzDGr4

That... that's your evidence that Google are a bunch of racists? Because they want to know how well applicants did in college?

Okay, then. Good luck with the lawsuits.

Well, INAL, but maybe that actually might be a good standing for a disparate impact suit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disparate_impact

Using GPA as a screening measure when members of a racial demographic routinely preform more poorly due to socioeconomic factors, it starts to look more like a proxy for race.

I don't think Google is asking for GPA anymore. Not for experienced hires, anyway. I can imagine they might still ask it for interns and college hires, where it's relevant. But they didn't ask me two years ago (I was seven years out of university at the time).

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