What if it was skin color, how ethnic your name is, or your gender? Did you know the majority of developers are men? Should we throw all the female applications in the trash because they're statistically not as likely to be developers?
Yeesh. Sorry if I sound hostile but... jeez. Correlation is not causation, etc etc.
Well, actually, thinking about it again now, I'm not so sure. But this now becomes an ethical question. Which is certainly important. But I want to be clear that the ethical question is a different question from the question of what a purely self-interested company should do. To that self-interest question, I think the OP and lots of people argue that the answer is "leetcode-style questions having nothing to do with the job and are thus a bad idea".
My claims are that 1) this is the wrong way to think about that self-interest question. The right way is to ask whether it is predictive of job performance. And 2) although I also suspect that leetcode-style questions aren't predictive, it's hard to be confident in that without good data.
> Should we throw all the female applications in the trash because they're statistically not as likely to be developers?
What do you mean?
What if skin colour, ethnicity or gender were highly predictive of job performance? It doesn't seem very ethical to judge candidates like this.
I believe the GP is not convinced by the "all that matters is that it's predictive of job performance" idea.