If I put out a simple coding test and some people cannot crack it - I'm not going to check if my 2+2 test is unfairly biased towards people with red hair.
Did you know, for example, that even fairly wealthy black American families are less able to educate their kids to the same level as white American families? Because access to proper education and parental education levels matter a lot. Because kids growing up in poor areas will get lower levels of attainment. Because long term poverty matters.
Breaking that education barrier takes more than one generation.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/280232788_Race_Pove...
We are actively looking for them, employing them whenever possible[0].
[0]: I lost two female candidates I tried to hire, one because she wasn't fluent in a language that a majority of our customers use and one because HR didn't react in time and when she interviewed with us she was also on the way to her second interview at another company.
Both landed well-paying jobs shortly afterwards. I guess we are not the only company trying to look diverse.
There are so few black people around here that I guess the reason I don't see more black coders is just statistics.
"It's generally easier to play the role of the Very Reasonable Person Who's Just Asking Questions when you're defending the status quo; any change you stymie by undercutting people's emotional energy or by slowing things down works to your advantage."
I gave a counterexample.
That said, in most cases, good equity policies have nothing to do with racist quotas, and everything to do with cultures which are accepting of diverse patterns of communication, cultures, and behavioral styles, and with identifying talent wherever it may be found, rather than using surface indicators like school someone went to, clothing, or similar.
In our case (we have some minorities but not as many as HN would like).
Why: because they aren't available.
We have KPIs for HR and managers that strongly encourage it, but there just aren't more qualified women/black/etc coders.
Which, in our case, translates to less than 5 (but awesome, and highly regarded) black persons[0], about 30% women.
[0]: Note however that the demographic is quite different here in Norway. I know people here who never saw black people except on holiday until they were far beyond 20 years old. In their defense though: 1.) Part of why there are so few black peopøe here seems to be that keeping slaves hasn't been popular here for hundreds of years. 2.) Norwegians have accepted a lot of people from other countries over the years: Pakistani, Chilean etc, so I don't think it is about xenophobia.