No no, I fully agree with you here. I just also continue this train of thought to say that doing the same thing by removing discriminatory hiring practices that were suppressing the hiring of women and URM applicants is also reducing discrimination. But somehow you seem to consistently disagree at that point.
To build on your example, imagine that the company doesn't immediately realize that their hiring process is tossing out resumes. They think it's working fine. Someone comes along and says "hey, your hiring of Catholics is surprisingly low compared to what we would expect." The company investigates and agrees. They realize it's not actually due to the system throwing out 50% of Catholic's resumes, but instead some automated screening software that misinterprets language that Catholics use and throws out a disproportionate number of their applications. Unfortunately, this system is extremely effective in other cases, so the company can't actually just entirely stop using it, or they'd be unable to effectively screen candidates at all.
The company devises a plan, with a measurable goal to increase employment among Catholics by 10% by the end of the year. They re-review some Catholic resumes resumes, and proactively reach out to some applicants who had been denied and re-interview them. They put some additional systems in place to manually review new incoming resumes by Catholic applicants. They work with the automated resume screening software provider to improve the software and stop rejecting the applicants. They reach out to Loyola and Georgetown and ensure that the students at these traditionally Catholic universities have some additional training on how to write their resumes in a way that gets past the screening software.
This all seems fine and good, both morally and legally, to me. Where do you land?
> You cannot deny, nor delay,
> I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here:
I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory. Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool, there are pretty reasonable business justifications, such as "any hiring process that is unable to find even a single potentially qualified minority applicant is probably irrevocably flawed."
To zero in on your Meta example, unless you can show that the hiring process was noticeable longer for some candidates than others, which I find deeply unlikely, the more reasonable explanation than your handwavy suggestion that
> But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.
is that it improved demographics by exposing decision makers (Hiring Managers) to more qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds. To phrase this differently: if we return to our Catholic example, if you implement a requirement that all roles must consider a Catholic, and this encourages recruiters to actively reach out to catholic hires, some of the folks who were autorejected by the screening process will be found despite being missed the first time.
> It was never even allowed by law.
I want to clarify, you are saying that the Department of Labor guidance as defined under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246, which has been the Department of Labor policy for 60 years now, is unlawful, and has been for 60 years, through multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle? Because that seems like it is beyond the pale of a reasonable understanding of the law. Of course it was (and still is) legal for companies to have diversity goals.
Given that the EO doesn't change the underlying law, while it is obviously no longer necessary for companies to comply, what they were doing before was clearly lawful and they can continue to do it!
> Imagine one company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% quota for women in engineering roles.
Quota has a specific meaning in these contexts, that among other things includes the concept of including objectively less qualified folks on the basis of the discriminated attribute. So a gendered quota would mean something like hiring the top N applicants from each group, even if for example, there were more qualified men being passed over, and this was actively acknowledged. If it's not doing that, legally speaking, it isn't a quota.
> Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
This requires deeper analysis: are they hiring only qualified applicants, but making new efforts to appeal and access previously untapped groups of qualified women? Great!
> This isn't a hypothetical example. Your own company created such a policy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-evaluate-executive... I wouldn't be surprised if Google does away with these totally-not-quotas the same way Meta ditched the DSA.
What Meta chooses to do or not is totally up to them, but they are not the arbiters of legality. This policy was implemented in the previous Trump admin. It was legal then. It's legal now.
> Whether you call them "goals" or "representation targets" or "diversity milestones", whenever you define success and failure in terms of numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class, it's almost certainly going to incentivize discrimination.
Put simply, I disagree. There are all sorts of ways to improve representation that aren't illegal. You seem to claim, however, that a number of commonly accepted, widely adopted, standard policies that companies have used for decades are actually illegal and have been the entire time. You understand why that causes me to doubt your reliability as an arbiter of what legal vs. illegal discrimination is, right?
Like, when you say "in my experience companies are simply ignoring these laws and adopting quotas or other discriminatory practices anyway", and I see the things you object to, which aren't quotas and aren't illegal, and have in some cases survived judicial review, and in some cases, are explicitly required by the government (see, for example, the consent decree in https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/radiant-services-pay-11-millio..., which requires "a recruitment plan and meet hiring goals to recruit, hire or place workers that reflect the percentage of non-Hispanic hires that would be expected based on the composition of the relevant labor pool"), you're saying that the actively practiced interpretation of the Title VII and the EEOC's practice for decades now is requiring illegal discrimination, and that's clearly untrue. You just disagree with the government on the specific kinds of discrimination that should be illegal, and that's fine, but you also shouldn't mislead people and claim that companies are doing things that are unlawful when they are just doing things you disprefer.
So I can institute a policy of delaying offers to pregnant women for 9 months?
> Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool,
Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
> You seem to claim, however, that a number of commonly accepted, widely adopted, standard policies that companies have used for decades are actually illegal and have been the entire time.
These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
> Quota has a specific meaning in these contexts, that among other things includes the concept of including objectively less qualified folks on the basis of the discriminated attribute. So a gendered quota would mean something like hiring the top N applicants from each group, even if for example, there were more qualified men being passed over, and this was actively acknowledged. If it's not doing that, legally speaking, it isn't a quota.
>> Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
>This requires deeper analysis: are they hiring only qualified applicants, but making new efforts to appeal and access previously untapped groups of qualified women? Great!
You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
The incentive structure this puts on employees is exactly the same. At this point you're defending quotas, as long as companies use a euphemism for them.
I do agree that these quotas are in common use. But you're wrong that using a euphemism for quotas makes them any different in function.
Throughout your replies, you repeatedly defend the use of non-discriminatory policies that don't treat applicants differently on th basis of protected class, and only involve soliciting more applications from diverse candidates. That's all fine and dandy. But then you turn around and try to defend policies that do discriminate on the basis of race and gender. This doesn't follow. The fact that a quota could theoretically be fulfilled by more aggressively soliciting applicants from the target demographic doesn't change the fact that it's a discriminatory policy. Especially when the quota calls for levels of representation well above the demographics's representation in the field, it's certain to result in biased hiring. And no, simply calling a quota something else doesn't change that fact.
The motte and bailey you've constructed is clear:
The motte: companies should analyze their hiring policies and make sure that candidates are treated no different on the basis of protected class. Yes, I agree.
The Bailey: companies should discriminate on the basis of protected class, including practices like delaying hiring for non-diverse candidates and setting numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class (so long as a word other than "quota" used) is used for those thresholds. No, not only do I not agree, such practices are prohibited by law.
Then I think my caveat ("Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool") applies.
> Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.
You can justify this numerically, right? Like, You have some data to back this up, right? Like you aren't just entirely making up a boogeyman, right? You have some evidence beyond your personal dissatisfaction and disapproval that the process actually results in significantly different processing times for diverse vs. non-diverse applicants, right? Because without such evidence, you're making a pretty conspiratorial claim.
> You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.
Yes, I agree with you. But now when you said
> That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
You can't have it both ways, this is why the language you use is important, because while it is true that many of these policies do take into account applicant race and gender, they do so in ways that are explicitly legal, and often explicitly required. So when you say any policy which "examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender" is illegal, you're wrong. That's not what the law says, that's not what the law thinks, that's not what the courts have held for 60 years.
If a company institutes a policy to reduce discrimination against a particular class, that policy must, necessarily recognize that class and consider it differently to ensure that it is treated fairly. The law recognizes this, you appear not to.
This is why I keep asking you to use more precise language, you're saying things are discriminatory, but you use that sometimes to mean in the illegal sense, and sometimes you mean in the practical sense of recognizing differences.
> You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.
You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
> These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.
The policies I'm describing, that the EEOC has forced companies to follow as part of consent decrees, and that the federal government has required of contractors, have in fact been required for decades. That tech companies chose to adopt something similar of their own volition and then un-adopt a few years later does not change the underlying legality of the class of policy.
No one was requiring Meta to implement specific diversity policies, and so they were free to stop doing them. That's true, but also the policies they had were not illegal, and other companies have done similar things for longer, and some companies are required to institute similar policies and have been for longer than Meta has existed.
> setting numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class (so long as a word other than "quota" used) is used for those thresholds
I continue to believe companies are able to achieve diverse hiring practices without resorting to illegal discrimination. You seem unwilling to believe this is even possible in theory, and contend that the simple act of having a diversity goal is de facto illegal. That simply isn't true, and I'd really appreciate it if you could read the links I've posted, such as https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/radiant-services-pay-11-millio..., where the government requires companies to institute such policies. You understand why it is odd to contend that the EEOC's operating procedure for the past 60 years is, on its face, illegal? If it were, you'd think someone would have won a court case to that effect.
I'd once again appreciate if you tell me which of the policies I suggested that the company undertake to increase Catholic representation are illegal, because as far as I can tell, all of them are illegal, and I'd like to know where or if you disagree.
Yes, if you compile statistics on how long candidates have to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled, you'll see that diverse candidates don't have to wait at all because the DSA is fulfilled the moment that a diverse candidate is interviewed but the non-diverse candidates are stuck waiting until a diverse candidate is interviewed.
This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
> You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".
The "The policy to 'increase diversity' and improve retention of Catholics" in the example above is to stop rejecting 50% of Catholic applicants.
If a company anonymizes its hiring and the hiring rate of women subsequently increases, then that is increasing the representation of women through non-discriminatory means.
If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
I'm not sure why you think this is a contradiction. If a policy uses the protected class of applicants or hires as a factor, it's discriminatory. Things like anonymizing interviews are not discriminatory. Do you really not understand why anonymizing hiring is non-discriminatory, but setting thresholds on the hiring outcomes and penalizing employees if those thresholds are not met is discrimination?
> You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.
A quota does not require setting a different hiring bar. Imagine I have a diversity goal of 40% women hires in software development. Only 20% of software developers are women, so in order to meet this quota, I flip a coin whenever a male developer applies and reject 50% of male applicants. The rest of the interview process proceeds as normal. This doesn't lower the bar for women. They still need to pass the same set of skills based interviews as men. But it's absolutely discrimination on the basis of gender to reject 50% of male applicants to pursue a diversity goal.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical? Your performance review score is reduced if you hire less than X% women in both cases. Is your line of argument really that the mere substitution of one word determines how employees will respond to the threat of lower performance reviews if a threshold isn't met?
> That simply isn't true, and I'd really appreciate it if you could read the links I've posted, such as https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/radiant-services-pay-11-millio..., where the government requires companies to institute such policies.
That was done as part of a settlement for a discrimination lawsuit. The exceptions to the prohibition on using race and gender as a factor in hiring are narrow. Bona fide occupational qualifications are one. You can specifically hire a Back actor to portray, say, Frederick Douglass in a movie. Consent decrees as part of a discrimination lawsuit are another.
But none of these apply to Google, or any of my past employers that engaged in discriminatory hiring. Your justification for discrimination on the basis of protected class only applies in a narrow set of circumstances.
So your contention is that the government regularly requires companies to undertake otherwise illegal activities, and that it would be illegal for the company to voluntarily follow a similar set of policies? Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim? I don't think I've ever seen the concept that a consent decree can require otherwise illegal actions.
> Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical?
My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
> If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.
In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal? It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
> This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.
Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal. And meta was actively admitting to illegal discrimination. I've been awarded money in a similar suit, so it's certainly possible for white men to win in discrimination cases.
Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
> Can you point to a statutory basis for this claim?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Title...
United Steelworkers vs. Weber established that use of protected class as a factor in employment is allowed only in narrow circumstances. In that instance, a company only hired steelworkers from a whites-only union, and were compelled by the government to give preferences to nonwhite employees for some period of time afterward.
In normal circumstances, a company cannot give racial preferences.
> My contention is that it does not require illegal activities to meet reasonably set hiring goals.
You still haven't answered the question:
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"
Why does one require illegal activities to meet, but not the latter? This remains unanswered.
> In your Catholic example, is saying "we have a goal to stop flipping the coin" illegal?
It's not.
> It is otherwise identical to a goal of increasing representation of a certain group by a certain percentage by changing some aspects of the hiring process that unfairly impacts a particular class.
Because it's using protected class as a factor in hiring.
Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
This is fourth time I've explained this, it seems like you're being willfully ignorant here.
> Why is that policy acceptable, but real world policies are, seemingly in every case, supposedly illegal?
They're not illegal in every case. Anonymizing interviews is legal, for example. The problem is that the legal ways of reducing discrimination don't lead to equitable results. Thus pushes towards equity require illegal discrimination, like setting thresholds and penalizing employees when those thresholds aren't met.
> Why haven't you sued them, if this was documented to the degree you describe, it was on its face illegal.
Because I'm not a victim of its policies. I'm Cuban so I'm one of the "diverse" candidates that fulfills the DSA. I have no basis to sue.
As phrased, I don't think the first would be illegal. It probably doesn't actually meet the definition of a quota, although use of the word "quota" is likely to receive stricter scrutiny.
If it can be met without illegal practices, it's perfectly fine, and if you don't actually institute a quota, even if you call it a quota, it's fine.
If the goal can be met by expanding the talent pool or by reducing discrimination, it doesn't matter what you call it.
> Say an orchestra adopts anonymous auditions, and the representation of women rises from 33% to 50%. That's a non-discriminatory hiring policy.
> Another orchestra issues a "goal" or "representation target" or "diversity milestone" or some other euphemism that allocates 50% of the orchestra seats to women. That's a discriminatory hiring policy.
Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions? Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
> Not regularly, only when companies are successfully sued for discriminating.
This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
Further, such goals were required by all federal contractors from 1965 to Jan 20 of this year (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246), its kind of silly to continue to claim that diversity goals are illegal when they've been required by every federal contractor for longer than any of the companies you've mentioned have existed.
"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
> Now what if they are the same orchestra, that is, they set a goal of hiring 50% women, and meet it by blinding auditions?
And what happens if they blind the auditions, but the share of women still falls short of 50%? Well, then they have to adjust the results of the blind auditions to match the quota.
You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means. But that doesn't change the fact that the policy is discriminatory, and almost certainly would result in discrimination.
If I tell my employers that I don't want to hire any pregnant women - say, we institute a "diversity goal" of 100% non-pregnant employees - they could achieve this goal without actually discriminating against any pregnant women. That doesn't change the fact that such a goal is discriminatory.
> Again, my contention is that it is not necessary to undertake illegal activities to achieve a diverse hiring goal.
I've witnessed firsthand companies setting diversity "goals" of 40% women electrical engineers. 10% of electrical engineers are women. There's no way this can be feasibly achieved without resorting to gender discrimination.
> You seem to agree with this in theory, but when given any concrete policy proposal, even ones that are widely accepted and have been adopted by wide swaths of the US for the better part of a century, you claim that they are illegal. You're simply incorrect.
I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal:
* Anonymous resume review
* Adopting objective evaluation criteria
* Create and send resumes to your recruiters, identical save for identifying information like names, and follow up on any discrepancies on call-backs.
> This is approximately a weekly occurrence (they settle about 2 cases per week), I'd say that's fairly regular.
~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
No they don't, they can (and in cases I've seen!) fail to reach the goals! Or they can adopt other legal policies such as additional ones I've suggested.
> Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women" You think this is legal?
As long as the methods of increasing representation are legal, yes. You yourself have said as much.
> You've repeatedly done this sneaky rhetorical slight of hand, where you endorse explicitly discriminatory policies and justify it with the claim that it could be achieved through non-discriminatory means.
No, I've been consistent that it is not illegal to have a hiring goal. Such a goal can be met in legal or illegal ways. You appear to consistently claim that even stating a goal and holding people accountable to it is illegal. I disagree. It depends entirely on what methods are chosen. The pursuit of diversity is not inherently illegal.
> I've listed numerous hiring policies that I explain are not illegal
And you've additionally claimed that a number of perfectly legal policies which are unlawfully discriminatory. Pipeline expansion policies with the aim of creating diverse candidate pool are perfectly legal, especially when they aim to account for flaws in existing talent pipelines that may be biased by missing underrepresented candidates.
Your objection to to these programs is that you claim meta announced that the goal of one of their programs was to delay giving interviews and offers to certain candidates with the intent of having those candidates drop out, so they could instead extend more offers to diverse candidates, and that you saw numerical documentation of these delays and their impact. And all I'm going to say so that's the most bullshit thing I've ever heard, because of it were in fact that well documented, it would be a slam dunk case and have been front page news.
The fact that no one else I've ever spoken to about such pipeline expansion and slate diversity programs has ever mentioned such a concern suggests that this "fact" you have is not as well documented or as clearly intentioned as you make it seem.
I'm going to disengage after this post, because we aren't getting anywhere and you appear to be inventing more and more elaborate liee to prop up your objection to these programs. That's your right, but it's not something I want to entertain further.
> ~100 cases a year nation wide makes it an extremely rare occurrence.
But I'll note you ignored the part where I mentioned every federal contractor has done things you claim are unlawful for 60 years.
No it does not. When orchestras put a veil between the auditioner and the evaluators and women's representation subsequently increased, that wasn't discrimination against men. That was discrimination against women being removed.
A policy of rejecting 50% of Catholics discriminates on the basis of religion. Removing this policy and adopting a non-discriminatory hiring practices may result in lower proportional representation of non-Catholics. That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.
> So would a policy that says that for any given position, you must interview at least one candidate from say 4 distinct declared racial backgrounds be legal in your view?
Nope, this is still using protected class as a factor in hiring. You cannot deny, nor delay, the hiring process on the basis protected class. Meta used this policy, they called it "Diverse Slate Approach". I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42753672
> While the relevant executive order was repealed, making it no longer required,
It was never even allowed by law. The executive order doesn't actually do anything except restating the protections of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964: discrimination on the basis of protected class is illegal in hiring. What it really did was signal that non-enforcement of antidiscrimination laws against "non-diverse" groups is no longer going to continue. This is why Meta ended the DSA, and why many institutions are rolling back their DEI programs.
> The crux being that while explicit hiring quotas are illegal, which is what I said, goals to measure against are not illegal.
Imagine one company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% quota for women in engineering roles.
Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.
What's the difference between these two policies?
This isn't a hypothetical example. Your own company created such a policy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-evaluate-executive... I wouldn't be surprised if Google does away with these totally-not-quotas the same way Meta ditched the DSA.
Whether you call them "goals" or "representation targets" or "diversity milestones", whenever you define success and failure in terms of numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class, it's almost certainly going to incentivize discrimination.
And again, in my experience companies are simply ignoring these laws and adopting quotas or other discriminatory practices anyway. Or at least they were during the previous administration, when they were confident enforcement would be lax.