If you want diverse engineering teams but you have a serious pipeline problem where few minority and female engineers apply, what can you do? One answer is to encourage more referrals for those candidates by paying a higher referral bonus. It doesn’t seem like “blatant discrimination” to me, any more than having a recruiting fair at a historically black college would be.

Also, as a side note, what company is this? And how are bonuses 5x as high for women but also “especially” for minority women. Which is it?

Apple added a feature in the latest version that helped women track their cycles. A few posters here couldn’t fathom why that was important.

In general referral bonuses are intended to provide a higher quality candidate pipeline at a lower price than a recruitment consultant, so I can see why throwing this incentive in there might seem like a good idea, but you need strong firewalls between the referral policy and the hiring decisionmaking to avoid perverse incentives. In particular it’s important the bonus doesn’t come out of the hiring team’s salary budget.