Duolingo achieved a 50% female ratio of new engineering college graduate hires
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To use a oversimplified model, assume everyone can be perfectly linearly ranked.
The gender ratio is skewed towards men at the top purely due to pipeline reasons (because college grads are nowhere close to 50/50).
Set a threshold to call your "standards" (say top 10 if you have budget for hiring 10 people).
If the top 10 are 7 men and 3 women, then you must give up on 2 of the men to fill it with 2 women from below the top 10.
Do you call this "not lowering standards"?
(I have no problem with lowering the bar to achieve better gender ratios because of long term social/game theoretical reasons. I just pedantically don't like lying to ourselves about not lowering the bar)
Remember duolingo don’t hire 100% of the available workforce so they can stay 50/50 just fine, they are just snapping up the most qualified woman and making it harder for everyone else to follow suit.
Looking at 1000 people, there are 70 men and 30 women who are above the bar, from which you can pick 5 men and 5 women.
But these 10 are still not the top 10 within the top 100! This is because the distribution of the top N never changes, assuming men and women are distributed identically. It is still 7 men to 3 women. The 10 you've chosen are not the absolutely best top 10 you could've chosen without considering gender.
You can double the size of the pipeline (e.g., there are now 200 people above your bar) and the argument will not change. The minimum ranking of their incoming class is still lower than just picking the absolute top 10 without considering gender.
I accept that this tradeoff is worth it (and above the bar, the actual performance difference between ranks is negligible). But I hate that people will not agree that is a tradeoff.
It's not about lowering the bar it's about making the extra investment to achieve diversity. It's worth it.
Then you are not in the "lowering the standards" part but in the "discriminating against men" part.
You cannot turn a 70/30 gender ratio into a 50/50 gender ratio without looking at the gender (Edit: When considering that all are all above the hiring bar).
Yes you can. As long as you are not hirering more than 60% of the Total available workforce.
Also see my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18210856
I remember watching a video about communism the other day that talks about equality. When trying to make everyone's pay "equal" while each person works a different number of hours, what ends up happening is that you don't pay equal hourly rates. If you pay everyone one equal hourly rate, then you can't make the total pay equal. It's important to see what factor we want to make equal for everyone.
Here he makes an elementary mistake when the input ratio probably isn't equal and somehow magically the output ratio is equal. What could possibly go wrong?
Recently found out the real reason everybody has these unlimited vacation policies - don't have to pay for unused vacation time.
It's better to come across as hypocritical but well-meaning than to have the real intentions revealed.