Here is one specific context where they are facing potential penalties because employee racial distribution != candidate pool racial distribution.
On the other hand, in a different context, tech companies as a whole are taking a lot of flak because employee racial distribution != population racial distribution.
> You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population
How is this even up for debate? Women and blacks are both underrepresented in majors like computer science compared to the population average. That flows directly into the candidate pool that tech companies need to hire from.
And this article cites one specific example where the 'qualified candidate pool' looks nothing at all like the American population average.
You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women?
We (lefty types) generally want companies, Governments and people to put in effort to expand the "qualified candidate pool" to a point where it generally matches the population, and then put effort into ensuring they're non-discriminatory in hiring.
Governments then create indexes which companies and politicians game because it's cheaper to "positively discriminate" in hiring than to put effort into attracting qualified candidates or fix the broader social issues, and then the population as a whole judges everybody by the index the Government created.
What a distressing view of the world, where people are forced to live their lives according to your conception of what the "proper" proportion of things are. The applicant-pool should reflect the people who want the job, period. If the people that want a particular job are 90% women, or 80% men, or 50% black, or whatever, then that's totally fine. We are a nation of individual people deciding what to do with our own lives.
In practice, people have pressures put on them from an early age to do whatever their elders think is best for them, and, frankly, their elders are often sexist, and the community they're born into might push them one way or another. This goes all the way up to the first year of university for many people.
There really isn't another good reason for a lot of what we see in terms of what people wind up doing (and some of how they behave while doing it!) when they're older, and we're well aware that socialisation during childhood is a powerful thing. As an example, there's relatively few people who are brought up without religion but find religion later - but there's a heck of a lot of people who were brought up with religion and never leave it.
Attempting to remove some of those pressures and counter-balance others seems perfectly reasonable, and unless there actually is something innate which causes boys to enjoy computers and girls to enjoy nursing, the result of that should be that we see a number of job markets level out to look like a reasonable cross-section of the population. Anybody who thinks that independent thinking is a good thing should likely support these efforts, or at least the well-implemented ones.
Here is one specific context where they are facing potential penalties because employee racial distribution != candidate pool racial distribution.
On the other hand, in a different context, tech companies as a whole are taking a lot of flak because employee racial distribution != population racial distribution.
> You also appear to be assuming that there's no way the qualified candidate pool could have as many women and black americans as the broader US population
How is this even up for debate? Women and blacks are both underrepresented in majors like computer science compared to the population average. That flows directly into the candidate pool that tech companies need to hire from.
And this article cites one specific example where the 'qualified candidate pool' looks nothing at all like the American population average.
You're saying if that candidate pool only had 15% women, we'd want Palantir to hire just 15% women?