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Say you’re looking to hire 20 people. So you pick the 20 best, and you end up with the 17 best men and the 3 best women. Of course you claim to be gender-blind and it just happens that you got 17 men and only 3 women, these things happen, it’s nobody’s fault.

Now imagine if you were required to hire 50% men and 50% women. So you’d end up with the top 10 men, and the top 10 women. What that means is, you didn’t hire the 11th - 17th rated men, and instead did hire the 4th - 10th rated women.

Now: maybe you think that’s not a fair system, and you’re probably right. But it would mean you’re hiring better candidates. You pass on some lower rated candidates that only made it through because they were guys, and instead got some higher rated candidates that you had passed on previously because they were women.

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AnthonyMouse 19 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You're assuming the men and women being judged on a different scale is the only way you can get a disparity to begin with.

Suppose to be qualified for the job you need a particular degree and 85% of the people who hold the degree are men. Then you'd expect 85% of the people you hire to be men, and what happens if you require 50% of them to be women?

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harimau777 19 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think it necessarily has to be all one thing or the other. For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring. Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.

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AnthonyMouse 17 hours ago | parent [-]

> For example, most proponents of DEI would advocate that they be used both for university recruitment and for hiring.

That doesn't justify setting the current target at 50% for employers whose current candidate pool is at 85%.

> Most would also advocate the society avoid messaging that certain degrees/careers are only for a given gender in order to avoid biasing who is interested in a certain degree/career.

How are you intending to control what the population believes? A lot of parents will tell their daughters not to be oil workers or truck drivers and a lot of the daughters will listen to them.

	▲	lazide 15 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And if you’ve ever been or been adjacent to oil workers or truck drivers - those daughters would be well served by listening, assuming they have any other options. They are brutal occupations that chew up and spit out the typically more physically robust men who make up the majority of those occupations on the regular.

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Izkata 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Unless the top 20 people only had 3 women, which is totally possible if there were 200 men and 30 women in the total applicants. In this case, you just discarded 7 more qualified men to get 7 less qualified women. Now in terms of average skill across your hires, it looks like men in general are more qualified than women and you're reinforcing the sexism, not fighting it.