I know this is not popular, but honestly how do you stop discrimination against women and others? It is easy to say “stop doing this,” but does that happen?

Blind hiring _might_ work: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/is-blind-hiring-...

To ignore gender this should be combined with gender-neutral voice processing for phone interviews, but it’s doable and not that hard.

These guys tried it out, I'll leave the interpretation of the conclusion to the reader

http://blog.interviewing.io/we-built-voice-modulation-to-mas...

(yes, its inconclusive, but)

> for technical ability, it appeared that men who were modulated to sound like women did a bit better than unmodulated men and that women who were modulated to sound like men did a bit worse than unmodulated women. Though these trends weren’t statistically significant, I am mentioning them because they were unexpected and definitely something to watch for as we collect more data.

What if the candidate went to Wellesley or Howard? What happens if the person went to university in Africa or Latin America? What if you puts SWE or NSBE on the resume, or obtained a merit-based UNCF scholarship and mentioned that as an achievement? The blind hiring system would fall flat pretty quickly.

What happens after the person is hired?

You stop discrimination by changing the brand. Many people have the impression that women aren't good at STEM, so hire more high quality women. Can't find enough of them? Grow your own. Google can start free bootcamps and apprenticeships aimed at women (men are welcomed too of course, just like women in engineering groups), don't graduate them until they meet a certain level of excellence. It might be more expensive, but rebranding is not cheap.

How do you create a bootcamp/apprenticeship system aimed at women, but is gender neutral in terms of admissions?

The problem is, there is no way for an organization to tell whether it's succeeding at this, besides looking at the hiring outcomes.

There are actually lots of ways. The most obvious way is to secondary screen using a external party all rejected candidates to make sure that the best candidates was selected. This will also provide you with political cover when you don’t just hire people on the basis of their skin color.

How do you know that external party isn't also biased?

They can only be biased if they know race/gender/etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinded_experiment

Ok, yeah, a third party with cleaned info would help. :)

You can't stop discrimination without addressing the long-term systemic effects of pervasive discrimination.

This sounds awfully like we had to destroy the village to save the village.

No one expects it will be easy to end discrimination, but it is hard to see how it will be solved by piling on more discrimination.

The phrase "we had to burn the village in order to save it" was uttered by the officer who perpetrated the My Lai massacre, and it was an unironic paraphrasing of "better dead than red". Nothing about addressing the past and ongoing effects of long-term discrimination requires destroying anything. If you think affirmative action is reverse discrimination, then fine: there are other ways to address systemic disparities.

Taking your boot off someone's throat doesn't make them your equal when they're still on the ground.

It seems this is an issue many don’t want to talk about. Is the solution to ignore systemic discrimination that led us to where we are today? That only leaves one group happy.