> You can justify this numerically, right? Like, You have some data to back this up, right? Like you aren't just entirely making up a boogeyman, right? You have some evidence beyond your personal dissatisfaction and disapproval that the process actually results in significantly different processing times for diverse vs. non-diverse applicants, right? Because without such evidence, you're making a pretty conspiratorial claim.

Yes, if you compile statistics on how long candidates have to wait for the DSA to be fulfilled, you'll see that diverse candidates don't have to wait at all because the DSA is fulfilled the moment that a diverse candidate is interviewed but the non-diverse candidates are stuck waiting until a diverse candidate is interviewed.

This is explicitly documented in Meta's hiring policies, both the mechanisms by which offers for non-diverse candidates are delayed and the goals of reducing non-diverse representation.

> You see how this is a contradiction. The policy to "increase diversity" and improve retention of Catholics isn't discriminatory, when you described it, but it is discriminatory now when it suits you since it "reduces the representation of <non-catholic> applicants".

The "The policy to 'increase diversity' and improve retention of Catholics" in the example above is to stop rejecting 50% of Catholic applicants.

If a company anonymizes its hiring and the hiring rate of women subsequently increases, then that is increasing the representation of women through non-discriminatory means.

If a company institutes a policy where managers' performance reviews are penalized unless they hire a certain percentage of women, then that is increasing representation through discriminatory means. The performance reviewed were changed to use the protected class of hires as a factor.

I'm not sure why you think this is a contradiction. If a policy uses the protected class of applicants or hires as a factor, it's discriminatory. Things like anonymizing interviews are not discriminatory. Do you really not understand why anonymizing hiring is non-discriminatory, but setting thresholds on the hiring outcomes and penalizing employees if those thresholds are not met is discrimination?

> You continue to not understand what a quota is, and how the law considers them different than other policies. If you maintain the same hiring bar, it isn't a quota. A quota functionally requires using a lower quality bar for such applicants, and using class, not qualification, as the deciding factor.

A quota does not require setting a different hiring bar. Imagine I have a diversity goal of 40% women hires in software development. Only 20% of software developers are women, so in order to meet this quota, I flip a coin whenever a male developer applies and reject 50% of male applicants. The rest of the interview process proceeds as normal. This doesn't lower the bar for women. They still need to pass the same set of skills based interviews as men. But it's absolutely discrimination on the basis of gender to reject 50% of male applicants to pursue a diversity goal.

"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a quota of X% women"

"Your performance review score is reduced if you don't meet a goal of X% women"

Why does one require lowering the bar, but the other does not, when the policies are functionally identical? Your performance review score is reduced if you hire less than X% women in both cases. Is your line of argument really that the mere substitution of one word determines how employees will respond to the threat of lower performance reviews if a threshold isn't met? That's ridiculous, both policies exert the exact same amount of pressure to meet the X% threshold. If penalizing people for failing to meet an X% quota will lead them to lower hiring standards or engage in discrimination, then there's no reason to think that the exact same policy save for the word used to refer to the threshold would have any different outcome.

> That simply isn't true, and I'd really appreciate it if you could read the links I've posted, such as https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/radiant-services-pay-11-millio..., where the government requires companies to institute such policies.

That was done as part of a settlement for a discrimination lawsuit. The exceptions to the prohibition on using race and gender as a factor in hiring are narrow. Bona fide occupational qualifications are one. You can specifically hire a Back actor to portray, say, Frederick Douglass in a movie. Consent decrees as part of a discrimination lawsuit are another.

But none of these apply to Google, or any of my past employers that engaged in discriminatory hiring. Your justification for discrimination on the basis of protected class only applies in a narrow set of circumstances.