The way to tell would be to send effectively identical resumes differing only in the identity characteristics of the applicant and observing if there are disparities. Of course, most companies aren't interested in doing this: why would a company want to incriminate itself?
> ...an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class...
Requiring doctors to have an MD is going to have a disparate impact on all sorts of factors, including protected classes. Likewise, an anonymized leetcode question isn't going to pass candidates uniformly across identities. But there's a pretty strong case that the use of such measures is justified.
Prioritizing candidates with a referral might be argued to be a disparate impact without justification, and that's somewhere there might be a stronger case but it's not so clear cut.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/black-latino-teachers-collectin...
The commenter made it clear the team is becoming not just less diverse, but completely homogenous: "every one on the team" sharing the same identity characteristic as the lead.
I work in company which had huge freezings and promotions almost fully paused during last 1.5 year. The only promoted ppl that I worked close enough to evaluate them were really, really good.
Because those are very important distinctions for formal complaints.
I've heard about it already
I would be more surprised if it was anything but “India and China” in your observations, just due to raw volumes.
In contrast, I have only worked with a small handful of Australians.. they are too few and far between to plausibly form all-Australian teams. I have worked with far more Japanese, Korean and Pakistani coworkers; these nationalities have been heavily represented in the workplaces I have experience with yet I've never seen nor heard of a team where they were conspicuously over-represented.
Another thing: In my entire career I've never been on a team of only white people (of any nationality), nor to the best of my recollection have I ever seen a team larger than 4 or 5 that only had white people. Guestimating some rough numbers... if a company is 50% white and 15% Chinese and there are no ethnic biases present, what are the odds I would see numerous large all-Chinese teams but never a large all-white team? This sort of circumstance arising without bias seems deeply implausible.
The best place you can be in corporate america is unseen by middle management and have a good immediate boss who values you.
This is true! Unfortunately nobody who investigates this stuff has any sense of discretion, so the subject gets tipped off during the questioning itself.
This isn't even limited to HR/corporate anything, I've had this happen with fucking CPS of all things. They didn't even try to be indirect and outright questioned the alleged perpetrator using the exact verbiage from my supposedly-anonymous report-- events of which only I was a witness to. My working relationship with the subject was great from there.
Right now I'm mulling over what to do with a report from HR personnel about one of their own, involving a [female] employee reporting their known-autistic, high-achieving [female] boss for actual espionage. Our workplace harassment policy says to report everything, even if it's hearsay. As with social media abuse claims, there is no consequence for false reporting or claims made in bad faith, so now I'm spinning wheels on this. I can't tell if it's a disgruntled employee, or the named exec trying to stage a persecution complex.
Whether or not she actually did it, based on the specificity of the claims, if I question the subject, she'll know who reported her. If she did do what's alleged, I can't prove it and she certainly wouldn't admit it, so the only possible outcome my intervention facilitates is opening the door for retaliation either way. I don't want to be the arbiter of HR's internal workplace politics, but who am I going to report false/bad-faith claims to? HR? (Legal won't hear anything without evidence.)
These decisions aren't easy. The workplace "rules" are so incoherent they're easily exploited. I'm taking the workplace harassment training right now; reportable offenses apparently include gossip about someone's hairstyle. Apparently nobody has ever played the game of crybullying before...
If it's not worth risking your entire career for, it's not worth reporting. Unethical business practices? Grow up. Fraud? There's probably a hotline for that. Sexual assault? Call the police. If you don't want retaliation from the company, don't fucking involve the company.
Let's say, for example, I wanted to report something along the lines of: <person_with_specific attribute> becoming a manager, then every one on the team slowly being replaced with <person_with_specific attribute> at <large_well_known_tech_company>. I'm not convinced this is possible without retaliation.
I would love to see a survey with one question asked at all tech companies with more then 100 employees. "Promotions are based on merit, answer from 0 to 10."