You want a diverse workforce, but discriminating against any single group is still illegal. A lawsuit filed by Arne Wilberg, who worked as a recruiter at YouTube for four years (and five years in other positions), claims that YouTube set quotas, and told recruiters to cancel interviews with candidates that didn’t mean the company’s diversity goals. This meant that white and Asian males were rejected on the basis of their race and gender alone.
Sometimes people think that only minorities and women are in a “protected” class, but the reality is that every human on the planet is in a “protected class” according to US law. The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex and race, period. It doesn’t just protect people of certain races.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google (who owns YouTube) will “vigorously” defend it’s hiring practices. A Google spokeswoman said:
To keep reading, click here: YouTube Shows How Not to Do Diversity
Yea!
You would think by now someone would find a way to select candidates without needing to supply information on gender, age, race, and income background. The job search should only need proof of ability to perform job skills
Unfortunately, we’re talking about jobs that will never be filled without an interview, almost always face to face. And at that point, it’s impossible for the interviewer to *not* know gender and race, at the least. There’s no way around that.
That would be great. Unfortunately, many HR people’s idea of fairness is to hire all the minorities they can regardless of competence or what they will cost the company. Look at the Australian company that had to stop using a perfectly gender-blind hiring method because it turned out that women weren’t getting hired.
I believe the law should simply legalize all kinds of discrimination and forget about the subject. There are still biased people out there, but they are too few to control all the jobs in most fields (and in the fields that are exceptions, we should look at deregulating those industries to enable more competitors to form).
Besides, everyone is so politically polarized these days that allowing some self-segregation may be the only way to prevent total war, as Google’s firing of Damore (and its managers’ biased comments revealed afterward) shows.
jdgalt,
This is something I’ve thought a lot about. What if we did legalize discrimination by companies? Would we see 100 percent black companies, 100 percent female companies, 100 percent white companies? Should we let the free market sort it out?
I think it’s an idea that has merit.
We never really lived in a situation where this was the case. People look to pre-civil rights era as something like this, but the reality was, in many states segregation was mandated by the government. We never said, “everyone do what they want.”
I’ve often toyed with the idea of exempting people from discrimination laws in exchange for a full release of their compensation data to all employees.
I fear this will become more of an issue now that the concept of it being impossible to be racist against whites or sexist against men is becoming so prevalent.
I thought you could opt out of answering such questions on a job application? I always did.