Earlier quoted context omitted.
The thing about startups and bias is that if you have a multitiered informal hiring process, a little bit of biases can be invisible and can be multiplied over filtering stages. The company may at one stage indeed "let's consider her" but unless the company's overall hiring is formally specified, unless your documenting and so keeping reasonably track of what you are doing, you may not know the way that biases are cr…
"Prove that you're not a witch" is a very old tactic - and it's the opposite of the modern standard of guilt.
I'll point out that we could have a conversation about diversity in hiring without ever introducing the subject of guilt.
This is a bit off-topic but I am fascinated about the exact reasons why some people react to conversations as if they have been accused of something. I think you might want to consider that nothing is useful is gained if you introduce the concept of "guilt" into a conversation where it is not needed.
I'll offer an example that has already been discussed on hundreds of blogs. You may recall in 2007 that John Kenzer interviewed Alex Payne? (I am sorry that the interview seems to be offline: http://www.radicalbehavior.com/5-question-interview-with-twi... but it is in the Internet Archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20070416091128/http://www.radical...) and Alex Payne offered some common sense observations about the difficulty of scaling Rails:
"Running on Rails has forced us to deal with scaling issues ... far sooner than I think we would on another framework. Once you hit a certain threshold of traffic, either you need to strip out all the costly neat stuff that Rails does for you ... or move the slow parts of your application out of Rails, or both."
You may recall that David Heinemeier Hansson's response was overheated and irrational. He said that Alex Payne was blaming Rails for all of the problems at Twitter. But Payne had never blamed Rails for anything, he merely talked about how they were struggling to make it scale.
(I am sorry to say that David's response appears to be offline now: http://david.heinemeierhansson.com/arc/000608.html , and the Internet Archive doesn't have it: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://david.heinemeierhansson..... As a side note, let us all mourn how many important conversations get erased off the web.)
Many smart commentators pointed out that there was no need for David Heinemeier Hansson to introduce the concept of blame into that conversation. Alex Payne's words could have simply been taken as a constructive starting point for a larger conversation about how to scale Rails. But for some reason Hansson felt the need to frame the conversation in terms of accusations and guilt.
The same is true about this conversation, and your reaction. We can have a constructive conversation about increasing diversity in hiring without ever introducing the concept of guilt.
And yet, every time this subject comes up, someone feels the need to frame the whole thing in terms of accusations and guilt. The level of defensiveness on display is remarkable.