Programmdude t1_iu753ou wrote on October 29, 2022 at 1:42 AM

Reply to comment by tinybluntneedle in New Zealand women lawmakers outnumber men for the first time. by flabbywoofwoof

It might be due to my misunderstanding of quotas, as they have not been common in anywhere I've worked. My understanding is mostly from reading online about US universities where they want X% of black students, X% of asian, etc. Therefore, when a student A applies with the exact same GPA (and extracurricular activities or whatever else they use to determine who gets into university) as student B, but student A is white and B is black, B will get in while A won't.

I'm assuming it works somewhat similar with hiring quotas, where they want roughly 50% female staff, so if there currently 40% male staff, then either they can't hire females, or they are strongly encouraged to hire more males (or vice versa if there are more male staff).

My solution wasn't to have quotas in the hiring staff at all, it was to have no quoatas anywhere. It also wasn't a solution, it was an ideal. My core argument is that if the hiring team is representative, then they will hire in such a way that you'll end up with representative workforce. That's because the bias' should cancel each other out. If men are biased to hire men, and women are biased to hire women, having 50% men and 50% women on a hiring team should result in 50% men and 50% women being hired.

tinybluntneedle t1_iu77ogn wrote on October 29, 2022 at 2:04 AM

There are no laws for quotas in any country that force them on you. At most, there might be some lightweight directive that demand you try to fix extreme gender imbalances. Numerical quotas are not legalese. Companies define internally how they want to support gender and racial equality. Quotas also do not mean that you want everything to be 50/50 as a first milestone but try to infuse diversity in teams step by step. No company is going to force itself to continuously hire less qualified staff and harm their bottom line over a self imposed rule. Furthermore staffing is more complex than just how many years of experience one has. There are a lot of things that influence a decision. Even among 2 white male candidates, it is not necessarily that the one with the most work experience gets hired, sometime another candidate may have less experience overall but is fluent in a particular tech stack of interest, or maybe shows personality traits that make them more likeable and flexible in the eyes of their potential employer. As for your suggestion about hiring staff, bias affects men and women alike. Also even if you create a 50/50 hiring staff, male inherent bias and female learnt bias will still tilt the decision in a bad way. Bias needs decades to be unlearned.

In a perfect world we would not need quotas. We are far from a perfect world.