There are folks of certain political persuasions that would suggest that you are ignorant of the struggle and your white privilege is manifesting itself. This is exactly why I don't understand the "we need a woman president" malarkey. No, we need competent people regardless of their color or genatalia. This idea that we 'need' more this or more that is actually sexist and/or racist by definition.

Something like this became a bit of a meme.

http://geekfeminism.org/2009/11/29/questioning-the-merit-of-...

In my opinion, it's not as easy as it sounds. We all have biases and prejudices, some that we are aware of and some that we don't even notice.

Personally, I think you need a pretty mixed group of people in charge of hiring in order to get anywhere near to a fair and balanced process. It's too easy to discount racist or sexist hiring practices (either subconcious or overt) under the guise of wanting people who "fit with the team's culture".

You might as well ask 'what happened to bigfoot'.

When has this ever happened in reality? Every other week I see a HN link about how hard it is to actually identify talent and how companies continue to screw it up (hence: hire slow, fire fast). Many hires (especially of A peoople) tend happen on the basis of personal networks as well.

While merit plays a role, pretending that before affirmative action hiring was merit-based is naive at best.

Given this, I'd like you to please consider that the perception that a specific gender or race is worse at tech may be a bigger influence in an interview than the objective merit or lack thereof that candidate has (something that's impossible to measure in knowledge-work anyways).

It became bad PR.

LinkedIn exists because hiring people on merit doesn't exist.

Systemic biases complicate the assessment of merit.