That's the important question here, especially since there have now been preliminary experiments in tech interviews suggesting such an outcome is not implausible:
http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...
The point is to remove as many obstacles as possible. We want the best to get the jobs, but if the are barriers based on gender or race or religion that's potentially denying us a brilliant woman, or black man, or Muslim.
It doesn't necessarily mean you end up at 50/50, I'm quite willing to accept that the sexes might be biologically different in brain structure and that this might mean one sex might have different average aptitudes, but I won't accept a societal construct on top of that.
You should never hear that someone shouldn't try to do something because of their sex. Never.
Well unless it involves the more obvious anatomical differences. The average man is going to have some difficulty becoming an effective wet nurse.
I'm personally rather convinced of a third alternative: There is some bias and even outright discrimination in some workplaces, but gender norms in society as a whole create such a big difference in the distribution of applicants/talent pool that it becomes impossible to correct as late in life as the hiring process. I think the gender norms are very deeply rooted and entwined through most aspects of life and that if we truly want to fix the problem, as opposed to get good PR and pay lip service, we need to change gender roles drastically. And that starts pretty much from pregnancy and goes way beyond recruiting.
Lots of people primarily identify by their religious affiliations. I think that's fair.
> Your sex and skin colour is given, your religion can change.
Ask a Muslim which will change first: their gender, their skin color, or whether Mohammed was Allah's prophet.
All that being said, your point about religion and race being separate categories is fair and well taken.
You are generalizing in a way that will create animosity. There are liberal people which identify as muslims.
Even though most religious people identify themselves by their religious affiliations, not all do, and not everbody is religious.
I think religion is a cancerous meme, that we shouldn't pay respect to. I don't even want to be asked whether I am religious, nor what religion.
My name allows a funny pun in that regard: I'm Christian, but I'm not.
> I think religion is a cancerous meme
My underlying point was that people with faith don't see their faith as a choice about the existence and character of their god (or other non-deist beliefs). It's not objective or accurate to say religion is different because it's a choice.
If anyone is offended by my point, I would challenge them to rethink their assumptions about how tolerant and accepting they are.
The goal isn't to choose some specific gender balance and then take whatever steps necessary to produce it, it's to eliminate unfair bias. The way to do that is to find it, not indirectly by looking at ratios, but directly by actually finding it.
High school teachers who say things like "women are no good at computers" to young women should be reprimanded etc. Poll women who didn't go into tech and ask them why not, and if any of the reasons are unjust then change them.
If no one can find anything like that then the gender balance at that point is what it's supposed to be. We're obviously not there yet, but the way we know is because we keep finding things like that, not because the gender balance is uneven.
Perhaps somebody has already done this. What would be the correct search terms?
It's a specific instance of the more general manage-by-metrics disease. The thing you actually want is hard to measure, but it correlates with something that is easy to measure. So instead of doing the hard work to understand what is actually happening in detail, they measure the easy thing and optimize for that instead. Even though doing that frequently breaks the original correlation.
The result is the bureaucracy edition of a paperclip maximizer. You get what you measure instead of what you really want. Or bang your head against the wall, if the thing you measured is actually stickier than the real problem.
> t would be interesting to try to measure the bias directly. Hide a bunch of microphones in offices and see if the number of sexist comments is larger at Google than it is at a law firm or a hospital.
To some extent this is just the same disease. Is sexism supposed to be alright if it turns out there are equally large amounts in both places? Should we be satisfied that it's the root of the problem if there is very little at Google but even less somewhere else?
Stop trying to measure things against other things and just consider them in their own right. Sexism is bad regardless of how common it is. You don't fight it because there is more of it over here than over there, you fight it everywhere because it exists when it shouldn't exist.
If you look at what the orchestra did and remove factors you know are irrelevant for the applicants then you should move towards a more unbiased state independent of what the number actually is. The problem is to find out what bias you have. One way is to compare the people who apply with the people you hire. You can see what traits you select on, then you can decide if you think those traits are good or bad.
You can't escape the fact that (assuming any innate differences whatsoever) equality of opportunity will mean unequal outcomes, and equality of outcomes requires unequal opportunities.
I think it's important to remember that this might not be the case. We want the best team (or orchestra, or whatever).