I’m an Ex-Google Woman Tech Leader and I’m Sick of Our Approach to Diversity

This seems to be another version of: "the pipeline of potential talent from colleges has very few women, so if we go out of our way to hire extra women, we'll reduce our overall hiring quality. The college pipeline needs to be fixed first."

Even if you concede that, here's something I don't see discussed often: hiring more women and minorities in big tech companies now could help to fix the college pipeline in future. If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.

That a big maybe, it's completely unproven. Maybe hiring slightly less qualified people just because of their demographic group will cause all sorts of strange resentments across the board. That seems to be what our current hiring protocols are doing now.

> If tech companies are seen to be diverse, welcoming environments, maybe more kids of all backgrounds will get interested in tech in the first place.

Exactly. If there is no incentive, and no examples of diverse workplaces, how can a young person decide that it's even a feasible option to pursue such a career?

On top of the fact that it has nothing to do with hiring "less qualified" minorities just fill some supposed quota. This is just patently false.

It can, and it can also harm it.

If you reduce your quality bar to fill a quota for a group, then that group can end up having a lower quality than the majority group, which then works to reinforce bad stereotypes in some of the majority against that minority.

That can then harm those in the minority group who were in fact above the bar and for whom the bar did not need to be lowered.

I'm not against quota systems but they need to be aggressively monitored so you don't get unintended effects.