Can you give any evidence that this is actually what occurs, that the "better fit" is not selected?
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.
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.
Do you know how they calculate the ratios for the pool of candidates? It seems it is not a easy thing to do.
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.
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.
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.
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]
[0]https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/tools-and-samples/hr-...
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.