> Or changing employee referral networks. When I ask if companies have employee referral networks, most say yes. But if I ask whether they’d have a structure for referrals of underrepresented groups, people often think that’s discriminatory and unfair.
Because it is. You can only remove bias by removing bias, not by introducing counter-bias. Removing names from resumes works, imposing quotas doesn't.
The problem with trying to counter bias with bias is that you can't make a shift on one axis without affecting five others. A bias in favor of e.g. racial minorities exacerbates the bias against everyone else of an underrepresented sex, economic status, religious minority, country of origin, disability, etc. But trying to enumerate all of the underrepresented groups is not only impossible because there are innumerably many of them, it leads to tokenism. Get yourself a couple of employees who each check multiple boxes and the numbers look good even when most of your employees are still white or asian male christian americans from middle class families.
By contrast, the bias in referral networks is the status quo. Hiring the people your existing employees know doesn't make a lack of diversity worse in any direction, it only fails to improve it by making future employees look like current employees. In theory there is an argument that when the status quo is unbalanced, anything that continues the status quo is also unbalanced, but that doesn't actually point to any solution. The status quo is the continuation of the status quo. Figuring out what will make positive change takes more than objecting to things that make no change.
And one way or another you still have to get 'em while they're young.