If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
>If this isn't actually the case, then their PR should make it known, because the implications of the current system do make it seem like minorities may be given precedence at the expense of white or asian men.
You want them to go out of their way to clarify assumptions you are making about things they never claimed?
If Google doesn't agree, I would like for them to publicly state this.
And even if it is and everybody is looking to hire the top 30% then the poll of the best women candidates quickly dries, and you have a harder time every time to find them. So if your agenda is to have 20% of women, you will probably ultimatly have to adjust your criteria.
gender should not mather, if you hire only the best you should hire them it does not mather if they are women or man.
There are many components to the problem, but one component is institutional bias in the hiring process itself. You assume that all candidates are given a fair shake by an impartial, unbiased set of criteria that should be ferreting out the best talent and making offers to only those people. But those supposedly impartial criteria are executed upon in interviews by fallible human beings with their own personal or institutional biases, not by impartial pattern-matching robots. Consequently, many talented female engineers are passed over for inferior male ones, not the other way around.
I have interviewed literally thousands of candidates in my tech management career, and not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative. I have, however, had to work with young male interviewers to train them to properly identify their own unconscious biases and to ensure that they are truly being as impartial as possible when interviewing candidates of any gender. And to the degree that that is impossible - well, that is why we still have diversity targets.
> not once have I seen an inferior female candidate picked over a superior male one because of a diversity initiative
What if you have an unconscious bias and didn't notice that inferior female candidates are being hired?
It's unconscious, you might just view men as inferior to women and not even know about it.
That implies that diversity initiatives are going to continue until we have slightly more than 50% representation. Which is not bad in and of itself, but it seems like the initiatives are not allowed to used research or data beyond less than 50% representation. It gets sinister and loaded with unintended consequences when the expected shortcut is just to implement quotas to teach that one metric.
>it strongly suggests that attempting to make the engineering team 50% female will result in a lower hiring bar for women.
I cannot speak for Google and I haven't been following their recruitment efforts.
However, I will say I'm a little tired of this notion that such companies are aiming for 50%.
I know one company that has really ramped up hiring of minorities (mostly women, though). And everyone is criticizing them for targeting 50% when there is a problem in the supply.
Except they never said they were targeting 50%. Not once. What they did was look at their different grade levels' skills, and compared that to the number of women in the market who should qualify, and compared that to the proportion in the company.
Example: They found that 20% of PhDs in a relevant field that they hired from were women, whereas in the company only 10% of PhDs hired were women. So their recruitment efforts are to hit 20%.
Not 50%.
Any time someone says 50%, they are likely invoking a strawman.