Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)

Prohibited Employment Policies/Practices

Under the laws enforced by EEOC, it is illegal to discriminate against someone (applicant or employee) because of that person's race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. It is also illegal to retaliate against a person because he or she complained about discrimination, filed a charge of discrimination, or participated in an employment discrimination investigation or lawsuit.

The law forbids discrimination in every aspect of employment.

The laws enforced by EEOC prohibit an employer or other covered entity from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative effect on applicants or employees of a particular race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), or national origin, or on an individual with a disability or class of individuals with disabilities, if the polices or practices at issue are not job-related and necessary to the operation of the business. The laws enforced by EEOC also prohibit an employer from using neutral employment policies and practices that have a disproportionately negative impact on applicants or employees age 40 or older, if the policies or practices at issue are not based on a reasonable factor other than age.

Job Advertisements

It is illegal for an employer to publish a job advertisement that shows a preference for or discourages someone from applying for a job because of his or her race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information.

For example, a help-wanted ad that seeks "females" or "recent college graduates" may discourage men and people over 40 from applying and may violate the law.

That said, I think the problem is that overall there aren't enough qualified under-represented minorities to get up to proportional representation. If there were, it would be a very confusing market failure. What's really going on is two things:

1) You can't be both under-privileged and as capable as everyone else on average. Being poor, abused, discriminated against, etc. affects our ability to do things like be really smart and get good at software engineering.

2) For those who are under-represented but not on average under-privileged (e.g. women in mathematics), we are seeing the result of a difference in preferences between men and women. Blue Team elites really don't want to admit that there are systematic differences in who prefers what that correlate with things like gender and race, but it is obviously the case. It's not rampant sexism relative to biology that explains why there are few women in e.g. mathematics, it's because women prefer to do other things on average. And there's nothing wrong with that, and we as a liberal society need to accept it. Of course, this is absolutely not to claim that women can't be just as good at maths.

Had he been a vanilla white guy, fewer places would have wasted his time. Instead they used him. Universities were especially bad about doing this, though not the only ones.