Many, many jobs are filled simply by virtue of the candidate's professional contacts, half-baked interview processes, and gut-instinct. Given this, it won't hurt to make an effort to hire more women and minorities in roles where they've been underrepresented.
Under your interpretation, they're still lying.
You can't _really_ tell, in advance, if one candidate or another is better suited. Sure, a "D" student who failed at the white-board is probably not a good choice compared to an "A" student who aced the whiteboard... usually.
But what we're talking about here, at worst, is relatively minor differences in a female vs male candidate, where the underrepresented gender gets a "boost." In other hiring scenarios, the candidate's professional contacts or school pedigree or family connections may give a similar (or even greater) boost.
That is literally the opposite of what the email says, unless you think that a) the company is intentionally lying and b) fewer than XX.X percentage of women are qualified for the job. (Since you haven't stated what XX.X is, I am somewhat worried that you think that this is true for all XX.X > 0.)
Also, this idea that there is a total order of humans on "qualified for the job" seems a little naive, as does the idea that your interview process can reliably identify the total order. In every interview process I've been involved with, we're perfectly happy to take anyone who's qualified for the job (and we barely trust our interview process to yield that one bit of information reliably) and interested in the job. If there are multiple candidates, we're usually happy to try to take all of them. If we can't, we're much more interested in finding who's the better fit for the team, including axes like skill gaps on the team and cultural fit, than ranking the successful candidates on who's "better qualified".
If they intend to increase the percentage of women, they intend to hire women. Hiring "the best people for the job" might increase the percentage of women, or decrease it, and would not be a reliable strategy to achieve the stated goal.
Why? Maybe you know, or at least strongly believe, that your previous hiring has been biased against women, in which case starting to hire the best people for the job would be (to your belief) a reliable strategy.
Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man, a 64% chance the best two are both men, a 51% chance the best three are all men, and so on.
Hiring the best candidates isn't a reliable strategy for increasing the percentage of women unless the current percentage of women is near 0 and you plan on hiring a lot of people.
If the current percentage of women is over 20%, hiring the best candidates is actually more likely to decrease the percentage of women.
> Under those conditions there's an 80% chance the best candidate is a man,
Hold up, I think you skipped a step there. I claim that 80% of engineers are men because of sexist employment practices, not because 80% of people qualified to be an engineer are men and employment practices are entirely unbiased.
Only if requiring a relevant degree is a sexist employment practice.
The 80/20 ratio begins in college, or earlier. Again, not something an individual employer can correct for in the short term.
One, there's a difference between necessary and sufficient. You can get a degree with a 4.0; you can get a degree with a 2.0. It seems entirely plausible to believe that (especially if, as argued by James Damore, men are attracted to tech because it's a high-status field) the number of men who are good at their job is a small subset of those who have a CS degree.
Two, if we believe that the 80/20 ratio begins in college and is reflective of biases and not actual ability, then it's at least reasonable to argue that requiring a degree is a sexist practice. (It might not be, too, but I think it's not 100% clear that it isn't.)
Here's a report from HBR on why women interested in studying engineering in college leave: https://hbr.org/2016/08/why-do-so-many-women-who-study-engin...
If there is a social effect from a sexist culture that discourages women who are struggling with their engineering classes from staying with their original choice of degree, but doesn't equally discourage men who are struggling with their engineering classes, we'd definitely expect to see the phenomenon I suggested above where more men receive engineering degrees than women, but that's not reflective of men being better at the work on average.
(Also, the HBR report points out that internships and job prospects have the effect of pushing apparent sexism back down the pipeline into college. People are smart enough to tell that they're better off picking a different field if they'll be unhappy in their current one. So causality can certainly be such that sexist practices in industry hiring create visible gender imbalance in college degrees.)
Three, plenty of tech companies have quite loudly proclaimed that a CS degree is not something you need to get into tech. Peter Thiel literally runs a fellowship encouraging people to drop out of college. Lots of famous founders are college dropouts. It makes little financial sense to go back and get a CS degree if you didn't make the decision to get one at 18; requiring one doesn't seem like a high-quality hiring practice, even leaving demographics and discrimination (in whatever direction) entirely out of the question. You'll have tons of false negatives.
Whatever the reason women drop out of, or don't enter, the field, an employer looking for people to hire will find that 80% of the candidates are men.
I am claiming that if 80% of the candidates are men and 20% are women, that's quite likely to be because that pool has far more unqualified men than unqualified women. Maybe it's 5% qualified men and 5% qualified women. Maybe it's 20% qualified men and 10% qualified women, which is still only 33% women, but very different from the original pool.
There is zero reason to believe that a process that specifically looks for the most qualified applicants is going to look the same as a process that chooses blindly and randomly from the applicants!
The only reason you'd expect that outcome to be guaranteed is if your hiring process is literally broken and has been picking people at random -- which is a good reason to move to one that actually tries to hire the most qualified people -- which is literally what the employer said it was doing.
That may be true but it's not a neutral assumption. You'll have to provide evidence.
I don't know what you mean by "sexist argument," but yes, I am making an argument that because of pervasive industry-wide sexism, ability is not independent of gender in applicants to tech jobs.
I agree that I need to provide evidence for this (and I'm sort of intending to write up something arguing this, but I'm at a conference this week). But I Googled for 'average gpa men women computer science', and the first paper I found shows that retention rates in college are worse for women than men year-over-year, but GPAs are worse for men than women year-over-year, which matches the hypothesis I came up with earlier.
https://engineering.purdue.edu/MIDFIELD/Papers/2005-graduati...
The second reason is that I want to know more about what's happening. As mentioned up-thread, I'm not a huge fan of university degree credentialism. I myself gave up finishing my master's after determining that there was nothing that it would gain me; it would not open any opportunities in life that I cared about. Given the fact that the tech industry seems to celebrate people (usually men) dropping out of college and becoming rockstars in a startup, is it possible that men are leaving college because they determine that spending more tuition money won't help them, but fewer women are confident of that? If so, then that's definitely an inequality, but the direction of the inequality and the ways to solve it are quite different from a naive reading of the facts.
This hypothesis would also explain the GPA difference: if we believe that some fraction of men doing well in college drop out, but women doing equally well tend to finish their degree, that would explain why the average GPA tends to be lower among men as time goes on.
Again, to be clear, I have no information about this; as mentioned I didn't know this until you brought it up. I'm hypothesizing, that's all. Certainly another hypothesis is "men are being pushed out of college for some reason." We'd need more data, for instance, information on what those men who drop out end up doing.
The third reason is that my selfish motivation is raising the quality of my potential coworkers, and my energy to care about all possible injustices in the world is limited. If there's a phenomenon of, say, men dropping out of college and joining a tech firm and becoming a mediocre coworker, then I will care somewhat immediately. If there are men dropping out who would be stellar performers and excellent teammates had they only finished their degree, I will also care. If there are men dropping out and going to some other industry because they're not good enough for tech, well, I'm sad about that and I wish we could retain and train them (I do genuinely believe that training + willingness to learn is way more important than innate ability), but it's not the highest-priority problem.
But this is all off-topic; do you agree that I've provided some data to argue that my hypothesis (that an 80/20 applicant pool is likely not to have an 80/20 split in qualified applicants) is at least within the realm of possibility?
The company can try to attract more women to interviews thus changing the 80%. Then you will hire more women, still selecting best people for the job. And it's not "hiring women intentionally" on my book.
That would certainly be recruiting women intentionally.
I object most of all to the dishonesty of the company's statement when they try to suggest that they can increase the percentage of women without discriminating.
You may say that "making your company more desirable for women" is discrimination as it makes a distinction in favor of women based on gender. Technically that would be correct. But this will not be discrimination in hiring. I.e. from the given candidate pool women will not be chosen over men because they are women.
This will not be hiring women intentionally. So the original statement in discussion may be correct.
(And to answer a potential objection: I am also in favor of mechanisms that encourage potentially-qualified non-women who would not have applied for the job to apply.)
I'm not. Gender-biased recruiting is orthogonal to "getting more people to apply".
You can change the gender balance of applicants without increasing the number, and vice-versa.
How did you conclude that? May be they are just making the work environment more suitable for women? May be more women are applying to your workplace? How did you conclude that the women engineers coming in are less qualified than men?