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geraldwhen

We have quotas we need to fill. Hiring a white male is basically a nonstarter without prostrating yourself before HR

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This reads to me as it's okay to discriminate as long as it's for the "right group".

I honestly feel a bit sick about all this. Maybe it's the only way, but it doesn't feel like it is from my perspective.

It's not the only way. They want you to think it is. Don't let them break you.

It is absolutely just another form of discrimination. In the past people thought they had reason too.

If you want compensatory justice and you are male, the only thing you could do is to resign and give your job to a woman. If you demand the same from others you are just as bad as someone that discriminated in the past.

There is no higher motivation behind this. HR just follows laws though, so you should boot your legislators for this.

Additionally it very much influences work relations for women far more negatively than for men, so they don't even profit from this aside very few selected high earning positions. But those will still have a problem with authority.

That sucks to hear as a white male but I still put the responsibility on myself. I should be so good at my job that they don't care that I'm a white male.

The context here is that applicants are overwhelmingly white and male. Most of the time it won't matter because you're the only category in the pool.

Depending on what country you are in, this is illegal no? Not hiring someone based on their ethnicity who is otherwise qualified/the best candidate is racial discrimination, regardless of what that ethnicity is.

In Brazil this is illegal, but when I saw this happening and told the government about it, I got an e-mail from a female judge, saying that hiring only women is fine because it "corrects the distortions", despite it being against the constitution... This is anecdote but I can say from personal experience that companies can get away with it.

I was horrified to find this [0] written in law for my country:

> Appropriate measures aimed at achieving true equality are not regarded as discriminatory.

[0] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/1996/1498_1498_1498/en#ar...

I have a white male friend who works in academia in NYC. They had a staff meeting at the college about hiring for open positions in several departments and were explicitly told that they were looking only for "diverse" candidates and that white men would not be considered.

We happily take anyone qualified and I get my bonus. But as mentioned, percentage of female employees is a KPI and it makes my boss looks good and it makes the CEO happy in all hands meetings.

My properties ensure that I won't face quotas that would be a barrier for emplyoment (well maybe my gender, I'm male), so, I'm just curious, so what if there's one position to fill, the male candidate scores 60%, and the female one scores 58% (using my hypothetical ranking system which actually works and is fair, etc, etc), so just slightly lower. Would your company pick the female candidate in this case?

I guess answering this question "the wrong way" would get a lot of butthurt people showing up to this thread, so feel free to not answer.

People need to realize is actual support for diversity means internalizing there is a benefit.

So if you actually believe there is a benefit to having a team of men and women (I do), then it's not "wrong" to let that guide you to the woman when any score above a 50% indicates someone who will be able to actually do the work.

You're pushing shit uphill with that argument on HN. A lot of these guys have never worked on a team with anything resembling gender balance, and they have an irrational fear of women.

Not OP, but I've seen some of this (though not terribly often). I don't think I've ever seen it come to a head and be explicitly about an attribute like that. I think that would make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Usually what I see is faster movement through the recruiting pipeline. In your case, the woman scores 58% a week before the man takes the test. There's no overt pressure to just accept her score and move on. She's just here, qualified, and ready to save us from having to do more interviews haha.

I don't have a poignant take on whether that's a good or bad thing. It definitely feels better than how I imagine having to pick between the two would, thought it still feels discriminatory. Then again, diversity in some sectors is low, so perhaps it makes sense for the hiring pipeline to give them some form of advantage, and this might be the least bad option.

The whole thing is a mess of moral ambiguity.

I am an engineer that involves in hiring (technical interviews, assignment reading (we have a home assignment for candidates)) and I have a couple experiences in which I felt like my decision was overruled.

One was a female applicant. I was reading her assignment and felt like it was subpar and my decision was a thumbs down. Later we went forward with the application to the technical interviews because it was a female and we "really needed to hire one" (to be clear, I didn't even know it was a female until my decision is overruled. We don't receive CVs or names while reviewing home assignments)

The other was a minority from a different country. My decision was thumbs down because the applicant basically lied in his CV about his past experience. HR overruled that by saying something like "...in his culture it is hard for people to admit their weaknesses..." and to top it off "we don't have anyone in our company from country X!" and he got hired.

So yea, positive reinforcement means you are not really looking for qualification and most things can be ignored to fill some quotas. And you won't be getting that bonus when someone else refers a minority that gets hired.

And to add, when I was hired I was also "first employee from country Y". Still wondering if I was a diversity hire

It is crappy to think you got a job not because you deserved it/good at it but yeah... Well if you need the opportunity I guess that's nice.

I have played the poverty card before regarding student loans.

>Hiring a white male is basically a nonstarter without prostrating yourself before HR

I struggle to believe what I'm reading.

I'm just curious what people of future will think about this.

In most companies hiring anyone requires some form of prostration to HR, so a little extra work to hire a white male is not going to slow anyone down.

A friend of mine works in a large organization in which the head passed down a rule that only women would be hired for positions 'unless' the only available qualified candidate happened to be male.

Can you guess what happened? It hasn't increased the relative number of women hired but now everyone thinks the men are extra special.

The thing kinda is, that it's not only male/female thing, but race's also involved.

Biases biases and biases.

I think we should try to reach equal opportunity by providing access to edu, mentors maybe, an ability to prove themselves, not this kind of "discrimination".

Exactly, it sets anyone up to failure that would only slightly be under suspicion to have profited from these decisions. Not only by judgement from others, it also undermines the faith of the candidates themselves.

This isn't something to claim without elaborating.

You're saying your company won't hire white males without extenuating circumstances?

I'd love to see the incredibly diverse teams there then... or is this a case of your company used to not hire non-whites and now they're trying to play catch up so they can beat a drum about DNI, meanwhile the culture that lead to a lack of diversity marches on internally?

> I’d love to see the incredibly diverse teams there then…

This is exactly the line of thinking that causes the aforementioned reluctance to hire yet another white male.

What on earth are you talking about?

You think the reason they're so desperate they're willing to gaslight minorities over their abilities (according to this anonymous unelaborated source) is because they have diverse teams?

Did you just stop reading after the ellipses or what?

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