It's as if they think people can't do math based on ethnicity. Those people are the true racists.
But you can still be challenged to prove in court that it's not only not directly racist, but also actually useful and related to the job requirements. Which can get expensive.
Lets say that Google added a test for its engineers, that screened for writing and communication skills. Think, SAT verbal questions or something. And lets say that it just so happens that women are a lot better at SAT verbal questions than men.
Would you call that meritocrat, to ask vocabulary questions to software engineers, given that they know that men will do much worse on them?
My verbal scores happened to be better than my math scores on both the SAT and the GRE, so I'd be all for this! Someone did a study in the 80's that suggested that programmers had to do more interaction involving details than other jobs. Good verbal abilities are going to help out, in my view.
If it genuinely screens for basic math, then there's nothing racist about it.
artificially discriminate in the opposite direction and suppress valid criteria that are statistically unfavorable to minorities.
Eroding meritocracy is ultimately bad for everyone. It's through climbing meritocratic ladders that minority groups throughout history have raised their prospects.