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Comment by bellyfullofbac | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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