Girls in Tech closes its doors after 17 years

But that aside, we don't know how management would handle the hypothetical. If I need to hire someone today and all I have are the "opportunistic" headcount available, am I allowed to hire an Asian man or am I required to leave the job unfilled? The use of the word "opportunistic" does make it sound as if this is not a hard requirement in all situations. But again, we are on HN and do not have access to anything like the full guidelines presented to management at Dropbox.

> The Problem Statement

> Based on 177 like tech companies in Silicon Valley (market research and EOO-1 Diversity Statistics data), the percentage of diverse engineering talent is sparse. In short, 4.7% are latino, 2.1% are African American, and 19.2% are female. These candidates are being targeted with all of our top competitors with white gloves tactics, strategic outreach, and engagement strategies, while Dropbox has yet to systematically establish any of these practices to compete for this top talent and showcase our uniquely inclusive, dynamic, and thoughtful culture.

> Opportunity to market DBX [Dropbox] more broadly:

> Moreover, diverse engineers are the most sought after group of individuals on the market today. While the average response rate to engage is high (37%) the rate at which they are interested in moving forwards is quite low (11%). We interpret this in two ways:

> First, due to the small pool and scarcity of diverse talent, companies are motivated to keep their diverse talent happy, well-compensated, and engaged; prospects are rarely on the market, and when they are, it is a highly calculated and careful search based on existing relationships.

> Second, traditional sourcing engagement methods (email, LinkedIn) do not adequately showcase what makes Dropbox special, and because these candidates are so highly sought-after, it would serve us to highlight our culture early on, and to take a more long term approach to courting them.

> Opportunistic Hiring

> As the business needs shift and open roles become more narrow, it will become difficult to find a home for diverse candidates that we're able to engage and who pass our bar. We feel like it would be a disservice to use in the long-term if we miss out on hiring critical talent for Dropbox because of current headcount constraints. To this end, we propose that Eng VP's withhold 20 heads to hire opportunistically.

> When a diverse/URM candidate is interested in interviewing, regardless of headcount, we will put them through the process. If they pass the TPS [technical phone screen] we will bring them onsite and evaluate based on their skillset.

>If the candidate goes to HC [hiring committee], we will proactively find a sponsor/team home for the candidate, and that team would receive a preciously withheld headcount for that hire.

As you can see, this really is a needlessly verbose way of saying "we're setting aside 20 headcount off-limits to white and Asian men". The fact that these set-aside headcount doesn't count towards the team's initial headcount does not change this fact: we had 20 headcount that were explicitly off-limits to white and Asian men.

What's even more interesting is that as per the company's diversity report, our tech workforces was 23% female as compared to the 19% cited in the policy announcement. So we actually had an overrepresentation of women at the time, yet we still instituted explicitly discriminatory policies favoring them.

If a firm is staffed by bigoted hiring managers that favor men, we'd actually expect closer to equal representation amongst those bigoted firms. Because they're bigoted against women and less likely to hire them, they end up with a more "equitable" workforce. If a firm in our hypothetical field is bigoted against women, and hires women at half the rate as men, then it'd actually end up with a representation of ~40% women and 60% men. It's closer to equitable because of its discriminatory policies.

This is a great example of why equity isn't evidence of nondiscrimination, and gender disparity isn't evidence of discrimination.

> Separately, why would this be obviously best for the company?

Illegally discriminating against pregnant women benefits the company: maternity leave is expensive, and avoiding expecting women saves money. Does that make it a good thing? Remember, nondiscrimination is both morally right and the law of the land (in most liberal democracies, at least), even if you have reason to believe that increasing or decreasing the representation of certain groups is advantageous.

> Does matching parity with the field somehow ensure the best quality or cost/performance?

Hiring the best candidates ensures the best quality and cost to performance ratio. Unless you have some reason to believe that men are better than women, then matching parity of the field is a side-effect of hiring the best candidates.

> Does this still hold at firms that are smaller than the largest (say: under 5k engineers)? Why?

Sure, a small sample size is going to have more variance. A one-woman consulting firm is going to have 100% women employees. That's not evidence of discrimination. But nor is a one-man consulting firm that's 100% male. Smaller firms have a lower sample size and are naturally going to have larger variance due to smaller sample sizes. But it'll all average out.

This is explicitly spelled out in the policies I sent you: the opportunistic hiring bucket is exclusive for women and URM. If you want to use the opportunistic hiring bucket, the candidate has to be either a woman or URM. What is hard to understand here?

> I think you and I have different definitions of what would constitute "overrepresentation" of women in a workforce. (Again, keeping in mind that at many/most tech companies, the majority of jobs are not held by engineers.)

The "opportunistic hiring" was exclusively for engineers. Also what do you mean by "overrepresentation"? Representation relative to the workforce is what's relevant. In a field that's 80% women and 20% men, having 50/50 representation would mean that women are one quarter as likely to be hired as men. This would require vastly disadvantaging women relative to men.