Ask HN: Am I being instructed to do something illegal? (DEI hiring practices)
In the spreadsheet that lists all the open positions, there's a new column next to open positions with DEI comments. It has a line like this:
Senior Software Engineer (must be female)
If I follow this spreadsheet and exclude male applicants, then would I break any laws? Or if not laws, then would I violate other regulations or ethical standards in the industry?
I ask because my understanding of anti-discrimination law is that there are certain classes of people that cannot be excluded from job openings. Things like sex and race.
If this is illegal then what's the right way to handle this? Are there other ways I should think about this besides legal/illegal or ethical/unethical? Does region or state within the USA matter?
A little more context:
As a SSE I would do interviews or screen candidates but now in a Sr Manager role I'm more involved in the early planning and management of the process. In the first meeting where I saw the comments I said nothing. I followed up a few days later with an email to VP eng to say I opposed. 2 days after that I had a call with VP eng where I raised the issue again and they insisted that the requirement remain. I've taken no more action after that.
218 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadOr maybe my HR training course fibbed? /shrug
I'm asking because if you want to "take them down" you totally can. Capture evidence and involve an employment lawyer. But what is in it for you? The lawyer will get paid handsomely. What about you? I don't think you're particularly damaged by this to ask for damages.
I have no animosity for the company or the leaders. No desire to "take them down" or cause any drama. But avoiding drama definitely wouldn't be a reason to do something illegal imo.
If you don’t get a satisfactory answer, report them to the US Dept of Labor/EEOC. I’d also recommend reporting them to the labor board in whichever state their headquarters is located (or what they consider their HQ if a remote org). To do nothing is to allow the unfair, abusive practice to continue. And if you do nothing, it will continue after you leave.
https://www.eeoc.gov/filing-charge-discrimination
https://www.eeoc.gov/how-file-charge-employment-discriminati...
I’m not sure quite what you mean when you say it «isn’t “causing drama”». It seems to me like some actions taken out of a desire to avoid violating labor law and anti-discrimination regulations, could result in people being upset with people, etc. which could be called “drama”. If you interpret “causing drama” as meaning, acting with a motivation of causing drama, then yes, as you say, acting with a motivation of avoiding violating [stuff] is not acting with a motivation of causing drama.
(I have no comment on what they should do; I imagine you are likely correct on that front, idk.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: your account has repeatedly been posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments. Would you please stop that? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
https://www.spigglelaw.com/employment-blog/employers-affirma...
""" Title VII prohibits employers from making employment decisions because of an individual’s skin color, national origin, sex, religion, or race. Therefore, it is illegal to give an applicant an advantage solely because of the applicant’s race. However, this is not always the case.
Under United Steelworkers of America v. Weber, an employer may voluntarily implement its own affirmative action plan. However, this is permissible only if the purpose is to remediate past failures to hire minority employees in areas that contain few minorities.
Under Executive Order 11246, certain government contractors must have affirmative action policies to identify instances where they are not hiring qualified minorities. Contractors can take steps to fix any such hiring discrepancies.
Despite these two major exceptions, employers may not use affirmative action to hire more minority employees solely to increase the diversity of their workforce. As a result, the Fisher case only applies to schools, not employers.
"""
So, uh, it depends.
That being said, it's usually the company that receives penalties in these situations, and not individual employees. If a lawsuit is made, and the lawsuit is successful (a big "if" in itself), it's not a guarantee that you will be held personally liable.
Ultimately, the whole thing stinks. I have worked in companies before where hiring based on discrimination was applauded. This was because individuals were being judged on the most superficial merits, cogs in a startup machine to be slowly ground into a fine dust. Ask yourself if you think this is a moral thing for a company to do, and if it's moral for you to go along with it. It's easy for talented people to get new jobs in our industry.
That's not what United Steelworkers v. Weber established though. The supreme court said:
> An affirmative action plan has to be (1) necessary (2) aiming to correct a statistical imbalance (3) not result in an absolute bar to hiring non-minorities (4) temporary, with an end date or goal (5) allow flexibility for hiring non-minorities.
There's no bar for "has been found guilty in the past".
A state should focus on real discrimination. By creating whole bureaucracies around this topic you have created a class of unproductive people that will mainly be driven by self-preservation of their job. You need a bureaucracy to ensure that rules are followed to ensure accessibility for example. But racial and sex quotas should surpass their mandate.
Additionally people in public service rarely have an understanding about competition in the labour market. The mechanisms that pit people against each other by skin color seem to completely elude them. For them it is a matter of representation as if they are dealing with 8 year olds. And even those have a more differentiated view.
The law here seems quite vague and I wonder if the interpretation would depend on the ideological composition of the court and perhaps what they had for breakfast that morning.
If I had to guess though, I think the court that decided United Steelworkers would also rule favorably on the legality of the OP's situation, and would apply basically the same principles to do so.
Women are obviously not a minority in the US, but does this apply if they're a minority in a particular field (such as engineering)?
Yep. I highly doubt we have enough info in the original question to give legal advice even if any of us were lawyers. We simply don't know enough about the company to know how the courts would see it.
My advice to OP: consult a lawyer. The law is fuzzy, and we don't have enough information to give a good answer.
Like,
Aiui (this is from memory and I don’t remember where I read this, so you should take it with a good serving of salt), the term “gender” previously meant simply “type”/“kind”/“sort”, but became a euphemism for specifically the concept which was at that time known as “sex”, in the sense of like, the general typology of people into two major classes, one masculine/“the male sex” and one feminine/“the female sex”. I’m not sure the reason a euphemism was used for this. I’m not sure if it was because of the word “sex” also being used for “sexual intercourse”, or if that came later . Regardless, this use of the word “gender” usurped its previous meaning as meaning “type”, and largely overtook the word “sex” as the common/polite way to say it.
As such, at this time, the question/answer pair “What is the patient’s gender?” “The patient is male.” would have been, as I understand it, perfectly normal.
I imagine that, over time, with the word “gender” being used more of the time that “sex” would have previously been used to refer to the typology as it was then understood, the term “sex” became more strongly associated with sexual intercourse, and became more uncomfortable to use . (I know that probably like, 8-9 years ago, I felt uncomfortable using it to refer to the general typology. Of course, this is after the change I will describe next.)
Now, having this pair of different words that largely were used for the same thing, must have been quite convenient for the social theorists / social architects, who promoted a new* distinction . (* new in the sense of common familiarity etc, not in the sense of “there was previously absolutely no concept at all of [...]”. Of course there has been much historical precedent of a number of concepts of [thing] beyond the usual two. Check out the etymology of the word “bad”. As Ecclesiastes says, there is nothing new under the sun.) Unsurprisingly, when dividing the one concept into two concepts, they chose to assign the one which they wanted to be considered to be the more important/relevant one, to the word which was more comfortable/less awkward to use.
And, being recognized by some as authorities, they managed to get this assignment of this division of a concept into two, assigned in the popular use, to these two distinct words.
However, I don’t think that at any point in this story, that “male/female” became uncommon as a name for both versions of the concept?
I would understand an attempt to associate male/female exclusively with “sex” in order to attempt to use the common-ness of “male”/“female” to re-orient things to have more of the emphasis on the concept which is now commonly referred to as “sex”, in much the same way that the naming of the two worked to put an emphasis on the concept now known as “gender”,
but, I don’t think that the fact of the matter is that many people tend to use “male” and “female” exclusively for “sex”.
I suppose there is a faction which tends to (especially in the case of “female”)? But it isn’t the majority.
I don’t claim that one shouldn’t attempt to influence how language changes over time to make it more in accordance with one’s preferences. I also have preferences about how language changes over time, and where I can, I try to further those preferences (e.g. I would prefer that people avoid using the word “literally” for emphasis, and I sometimes seek to further this goal by, mentioning it to people when I see them use it contrary to my preferences.)
But, as a fact-claim about the common meaning-i.e.-usage of the word “female”, the claim that “female” refers only to a “sex” and not to a “gender”, is (currently! This could change!) incorrect (except within certain circles).
Sex vs gender is a legit disambiguation.
Based on the recent post of a guy who said he represented as a black lesbian woman on his resume to get a job, verification is also legit.
(There was also a recent study that said that 30% of Whites misrepresented their race on their college application.)
Setting aside even a handful of slots forces the issue, and this can lead to orgs figuring out how to find people.
They need to take a step back and ask why equal outcomes is the goal to begin with? They can't seem to fathom that men and women naturally have different interests and inclinations. And if somehow the arbitrary identity groups that they decide on and end up hiring do end up reflecting the underlying society, then what? All problems are solved?
Where is the goal of DIE reached? Is there are limit when "discrimination" is gone? A certain percentage that needs to be reached? I would be completely surprised if that were the case and I believe this will only end in a bureaucratic hell hole.
From Wikipedia:
>"Section 159 of the Equality Act 2010 allows an employer to treat an applicant or employee with a protected characteristic (eg race, sex or age) more favourably in connection with recruitment or promotion than someone without that characteristic who is as qualified for the role. The employer must reasonably think that people with the protected characteristic suffer a disadvantage or are under-represented in that particular activity. Taking the positive action must be a proportionate means of enabling or encouraging people to overcome the disadvantage or to take part in the activity."
I guess the difference is whether you can hire a minority candidate even if they are objectively less qualified for a job? My understanding was that you could only use the characteristics as a tie breaker if two candidates were otherwise the same, but maybe that's wrong.
How would one even begin to prove the difference? This seems like some sort of mental gymnastic to explain away well meaning discrimination. If I had a thing against men, I'd take their applications, maybe give a few of them interviews for the sake of plausible deniability without a plan to actually hire them. And fortunately for me, society is callously indifferent to men in general unless they are part of a protected class.
And at least historically it's usually been the men who benefitted from this.
https://www.eeoc.gov/contact-eeoc
Sex and gender are protected classes, an employer cannot discriminate based on a protected class.
The law forbids the company from retaliating against you in any way as a result of an EEOC complaint investigation.
If you have signed a waiver or arbitration aggreement, you should take a look at that and talk to a lawyer.
A better way is to enforce DSA - Diverse Slate Approach - which ensure that you don’t recruit anybody without having considered multiple genders and/or ethnicity before making the offer.
The goal of DSA is to recruit the best candidate for the role, but ensure a broad set of candidates has been considered. It’s a win win for all and it works.
The real solution to diverse hiring is to actively recruit from sources that have the kind of people you're looking for. Your (not you parent comment, but the anonymous "you") current candidate sources are probably not very diverse so the end result is that your hiring is mirroring that.
Actively recruit and go after diverse candidate sources, and you'll hire diverse candidates.
He got tons of follow up interviews, only to be told that the company decided to hire internally, or some other excuse that strongly implied they already had another candidate in mind.
My friend, it ought not surprise you to discover, fits into several "minority" categories. The worst industry for this was academia, though his last round in the private sector was also tough.
Moral of the story: if you find a candidate that you want to hire, just hire them. Don't bring in a bunch of DEI candidates and make them feel like show dogs just so you can tick a checkbox that says you pretended to care about DEI.
Source: have worked for companies that have this policy, academia especially is famous for this level of institutional incompetence.
Regardless of the reason, it wastes people's time and is somewhat dishonest.
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.
Had be been your run of the mill white guy, far fewer of them would have wasted his time.
DEI crowd in silicon valley has no diversity of thought. It is a monoculture.
Also, depending on industry or company objectives, sometimes you don't want diversity of thought at all. You want coworkers that are aligned on a particular niche objective and have similar opinions especially if the company is trying to do something unconventional. Diversity hurts there and having people with various backgrounds is a disadvantage.
I'm at a non-tech company nowhere near SV. Diversity of thought is a joke. The company tells us to be candid, which is also a joke. I've been punished, both directly and indirectly, for speaking my mind and bringing up inconsistencies (respectfully).
No, it isn’t. OP is describing the intended use of DEI. A proper merit based approach would have 0 knowledge of race, gender, etc. DSA as well requires prior knowledge of irrelevant attributes of a candidate because its goal is to increase the representation of people with those attributes, not hire the best candidates.
Any process trying to select for the best developer does not need to know about race, gender, etc. Any process that asks for those is not looking for the best developers.
Which is exactly what blind-hiring / blind-auditions are meant to do. The problem, from my perspective having tried to implement it, is that it requires a real cognitive leap from people who are most successful for their social acumen and don't regularly make decisions based on hard evidence. Often those kinds of people have a title with Manager or Officer in it.
The best we can do is remove any bias we find at an individual level (ie a blind hiring process). Looking at aggregate level metrics is nearly useless because we cannot accurately account for all the factors contributing to them.
You’re arguing a different point. I’m talking about the filter on candidates, not eventual hires. Though of course, people who don’t become candidates will never become hires so there’s a relationship there.
It would be easy to see whether doing X to increase candidate diversity (opening up the filter) led to more diverse hires. Especially combined with blind hiring process or whatever at the individual level. But the individual work alone is not worth much if the candidate pool itself is too limited.
If changing the candidate pool leads to more diverse candidates, and then employees as a whole end up more diverse, it would follow that some of those people brought in at the candidate level out-competed their peers & that the overall standard of hires has increased, or at least is no different.
This is not about a target ratio of employed people. Though I think observations about such ratios compared to the general population and to other similar companies can be informative.
To get at the point you thought I was making though… How I feel about quotas is: they might be an ok temporary measure, especially if managed gently, not “must be a woman” for X role, cause yikes. Hiring is capricious a lot of the time anyway, especially at the margin when there is more than one acceptable candidate and all have different backgrounds and experience. All sorts of stuff will come into play. Good people will still be in demand regardless of their race. But if you lose a couple things because you aren’t from an underrepresented group and another acceptable candidate was, who actually cares. If it wasn’t that, it would be some other nonsense like the guy was the same race as you but supports the same football team as the interviewer, or your interview took place before lunch and the other person’s was after.
Since it’s already capricious and full of coin flips, I don’t care at all that sometimes it’s capricious for a relatively good reason like giving somebody else a shot. Fine.
I disagree completely that we have to be 100% certain about a problem before we take action. We just have to know that, more likely than not, there is a problem, and take measured, cautious steps to address it. To me it would be an extraordinary, mind-boggling, coincidence if it turned out that the status quo was working perfectly to get the best candidates hired.
1. Find merit based, good, but (unfortunately) majority candidate. 2. Position is held open, the meritorious engineer is waiting for an offer. 3. A few minority position trickle in that are nearly as good but not quite. 4. DEI argues you should choose the minority and uses an excuse like "they're trainable" to justify racist hiring practices.
In both these systems you really only wanted to use racist recruiting practices to hire non-white non-males. But to get around the legal concern step (4) gives you plausible deniability.
It is no surprise that your average person thinks these hiring practices are racist and they lead to tokenization of the very group you're trying to protect. Consequently all the "hidden bias" DEI bleets on about is brought on by them. Things like "they were only hired/promoted because they fit in X category" where X is something innate and uncontrollable. It is not "racist" to look at a minority coworker differently if you know for the fact they weren't hired on merit. No different than the CEO's son getting a promotion to VP. Both people are undeserving.
I am in the "majority" and have been passed up on promotions and probably not hired in several jobs because of things like this. Thanks to step (4) it is difficult to sue, but it would bring me great pleasure to take a company to court because of this.
DEI should be renamed DIE to reflect it's true nature at a company. The extremist, racist, wing of HR.
"According to the sociological perspective, members of privileged groups can experience prejudice, but their experience will be different than the experience of someone who experiences systemic racism."
One could argue that being in the majority you would have an easier time getting a lateral promotion than someone as a minority.
I would say that only hiring non-white people would be prejudice if and only if you consider that only hiring white people is prejudice and not racism too.
The common understanding of the term is not “incorrect”.
OP should share the name of his employer. It’s win-win. People his leadership considers undesirable will know not to apply. Big time saver all around.
I personally really want be part of a diverse and inclusive team, but so far, all attempts to "enforce" D&I I've seen or heard of inevitably failed in some form or another. I would argue that the biggest issue has to do with supply, not demand for diverse talent, and resolving that will take a while sadly.
If you're hiring for a particular position and you only get qualified white and Asian male applicants, for example, your three options are to either nuke the position, recruit somewhere that specifically selects against white and Asian men, or lower your qualification standards. Either way, the net result is that A) you don't fill the job and discriminate against all the applicants you got B) you spend more money on recruiting and outsource discrimination against the current applicant pool (e.g. to a women's college) C) you hire a worse employee and discriminate against the applicants who are a better fit for the job. This is not a "win win".
There are downsides to this approach as well.
My previous company had such a policy (no offer could be extended until at least one female or under-represented minority had been interviewed) - and we had someone who interned with us twice while in school and he was amazing, everybody on the team thought he was great and wanted to bring him on full-time once he graduated. So as he neared graduation our manager got us an open req and we extended him a (verbal) offer without interviewing him but HR blocked us from extending a formal offer because this exceptional engineer had the misfortune of being born male and Indian. HR told us we could extend an offer to him only after interviewing (on-site) a female or under-represented minority. And so we brought in and interviewed a female applicant wasting five hours of her time and ours as she had virtually zero chance of getting the job.
Generally it also meant female candidates were almost guaranteed to make it to the onsite, regardless of how they performed during the phonescreen because if you tried to pass on a female candidate you'd get pushback from the recruiter and/or manager, because with this policy we needed to interview at least one on-site before extending an offer to anyone.
I do genuinely applaud efforts at increasing diversity in tech, but I don't think policies like this are the right approach. We should probably be looking at other historically male dominated professions that now have gender-parity like medicine and law and emulate what they did to increase diversity (I have no idea what that is/was, but I'm guessing it's not what we're spinning our wheels on, since as far as I can tell we've barely moved the needle despite a very concerted effort).
Having said that, the above is probably good advice in many situations. Just not if you have an concern that you might personally get sued or prosecuted.
IMO limiting hiring pools based on race or gender is not a good thing and can only lead to animosity and eventually employee churn.
As an engineer I don’t really care- have I been discriminated against ? maybe, have I been privileged? Absolutely
With all the biases that humans have someone is always getting shafted - nothing is always 100% fair
Beyond that when in doubt, talk to a lawyer. At first glance to me (I am not a lawyer) this seems like it's probably illegal, but it's entirely possible there are nuances to which I'm not privy both in terms of legality and in terms of what's actually happening. A quick consult with an employment lawyer isn't that expensive and will give you a much better idea on how to proceed than HN ever can.
If you don't mind skipping straight to whistle-blowing, you can also talk to your State's department of labor, or the US Department of Labor. They tend to take such things seriously and will no doubt investigate.
Exactly. This is exactly why HR will want to know this is happening. So they can shut it down. A half decent HR department will recognize that this carries major risk of lawsuits, and want it killed. You bringing information to about another part of the company trying to do something illegal doesn't make you a "problem" employee.
There are a lot of cases where I'd recommend against talking to HR, but getting a spreadsheet from your boss and asking "hey this seems weird, is it legal?" is one of the things they are good for. Your boss is far more likely to hold a grudge than HR.
Obviously, don't go in screaming it's illegal and they must do something on the off chance it was your Chief People Officer's shitty idea.
And again, nothing wrong with going to an employment lawyer first. But when I've seen blatantly illegal stuff like this it's usually that HR isn't involved in the hiring process and they want to know when it happens so they can educate the relevant parties.
Sometimes. Some HR departments in Silicon Valley have taken DEI to heart to the point where they’d be champions of this hiring behavior.
Doesn't really seem like an "off chance" to me that this would come from either the Chief People Officer, or someone else sufficiently high up in the food chain that they can tell HR to fall back in line.
If you’re reading this and are in a similar situation, please don’t accept this advice without further reflection. On this particular topic, it could very well be wrong. If you’ve decided to report it then I’d suggest using your company’s outside anonymous reporting facility if such a thing exists.
99% chance they say no, they'll handle it. 1% chance they say yes, it's fine. If you hit that 1%, don't argue it, lawyer up or decide this isn't your hill.
If you really live in an office so punitive that you think HR (not your boss) is going to come down on you for a casual question and accepting their answer, your already so screwed that no amount of playing things close to your chest is going to help you. You need to already be on your way out because your office is so wild you can't predict when the boot is coming. If you are in this office, you probably already know it, because everything is already broken, and aren't posting "Ask HNs" about it.
Also worth noting is that HR managers are overwhelmingly female[1], and in my experience they tend to be some of the more die-hard believers in DEI. If you're concerned that a policy may be discriminating against a male, you're taking a huge gamble by talking to them. It's quite likely that it was their idea in the first place.
[1]: https://www.hrdive.com/news/the-hr-professions-big-diversity...
Not unless the author reveal the name of the company, which they didn't (as far as I can see at the time of writing).
You have a couple different possible moves here:
1) Bring it up to your company's HR, compliance people, or legal team. If you want to stay and look good, this is an okay move. Frame it as, "This probably exposes us to A LOT of liability, no? Just thought I'd let you know".
2) Report them to the relevant authorities. This is the EEOC at the Department of Labor (Federal) and your state's EEOC or EEOC-equivalent. If you're planning on leaving I would definitely do this. Gather evidence of the illegal activity first and then submit. Many states will have whistleblower protections such that what the company can do to hurt you is very limited. You may even end up getting paid for no work.
3) Develop a list of candidates who were illegally discriminated against and notify them. They can then sue the company themselves.
1, 2, and 3 aren't exclusive. You can do a combination: for instance, let the company know and report them to EEOC. If you have the means and want to do a little good in the world, I think spending a couple hundred dollars on talking to a lawyer for an hour or two is a good move as well.
Next-level might be looking up similar cases in the past and talking to the attorneys who worked on them.
Of course, if you have any sympathetic lawyer friends you might ask them too!
As an aside, thank you for caring and for doing something about this :-)
It's kind of mind-boggling that we're in this situation where illegal discrimination in hiring is not only tolerated, but generally encouraged.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_action_in_the_Unit...
"It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Title...
Quota based hiring is explicitly illegal in the US (Gratz v. Bollinger)
The way to do this properly is by "Positive Action" (when all else is equal, prefer a candidate that fulfils a diversity criteria)... not to be confused with "Positive Discrimination" (the setting of quotas or in your case excluding a demographic from being considered for the role).
You can find an example of this enshrined in UK law https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2010/15/part/11/chapter... (I know you're in the US, but I find the UK law very easy to find and to read).
The spirit of it is simple: Interview everyone equally, give all the opportunity... but if you have to choose between 2 candidates who fare equally through interviewing then you may factor in any disadvantages that arise from their sex, gender, race, background, etc... and in those cases you may now favour that candidate.
This process does not exclude people or "lower the bar" for the diverse demographic... it favours only when everything else is equal.
The only difference between these two things is perhaps a matter of degree. The net result is that you preferentially hire a group based on sex/race/etc.
However after being part of dozens of hiring panels I noticed a clear trend toward rating females/minorities hire on technical skills than they would give to a white male with the same performance. After having conversations about it I truly don't think the people noticed what they are doing. Even after pointing it out some would still deny it, and of course it's not possible to prove given that it's highly subjective. It's just a really, really hard thing to see in ourselves.
I don't know what the answer is. I'm going to keep striving for the standard you laid out, but it's continually difficult to know how you're doing.
Sounds like another case of "go woke go broke". This is why we see a lot of progressive policies in academia and government... Where losing money doesn't matter.
I'm not sure about the USA but in the UK discriminating is acceptable as long as you are discriminating in favour of a category which is under-represented.
Of course, given you can split humans in an infinite number of categories, this is basically meaningless and it's just plain discrimination.
One of my previous employers in the UK was working primarily with recruiters that brought candidates with the correct gender / race.
> It shall be an unlawful employment practice for an employer to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of such individual's race, color, religion, sex, or national origin
This is the law of the US. It couldn’t be more clear that your company is breaking the law. And yet it’s been completely neutered by activist judges and well-meaning executives and bureaucrats.
Correct
> nor have the resources to fully enforce all the laws.
I don't think so. They have all the resources they need to enforce the law if they wanted to. If the spreadsheet had said "male" instead of "female" they would fly to Uranus to gather evidence if they needed to.
Maybe an individual occurrence. Not at scale. If I remember correctly, 80+% of cases go to a plea deal, wait times for a court date are months or years, and the murder solve rate in the US is only 70%. To me, it sounds like the courts are overwhelmed and even the most serious crimes have a relatively low solve rate.
The courts have been clear that this kind of discrimination is illegal. “Our next engineer must be female” isn’t legal, unless there’s something bizarrely gender specific about this task.
If the Company is a federal contractor, this could be nuclear. Talk to a lawyer, not HN.
As long as federal prosecutors don't care, "the law of the US" has no teeth.
The last 20 years civil liberties were made into a joke with anti-terror legislation. Some overextended bureaucrats believe they can counter these self-imposed developments by being the savior of womanhood, but nobody would propose discrimination in jobs that aren't prestigious. It is a complete paper tiger an lawfare. I fully believe judges will make decisions against the letter of the law, they are a suboptimal safeguard for civil liberties by now. They just legislate an exception and these clauses suddenly have no values anymore. Some people also thought humanism must be improved by making sex and race an issue again.
Companies might like to comply so that nobody looks closer at their business models.