throwawaygender

I agree with this but the $30k could've also gotten hires of a higher quality ignoring gender considering the larger pipeline.

Also see my other reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18210856

For nicer numbers, assume the bar is top 10% and you have a budget for 10 new hires.

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.

> We achieved a 50% ratio not by lowering our standards or by discriminating against men

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)