> I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory.

So I can institute a policy of delaying offers to pregnant women for 9 months?

> Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool,

Yes, that is the intent. The longer candidates have to wait for an offer, the more likely they are to accept a competing offer or drop out of the hiring process. The way the DSA increased the representation of "diverse" demographics is by making "non-diverse" candidates wait a potentially long time for the DSA to be fulfilled, while diverse candidates never had to wait because their inclusion immediately fulfilled the DSA.

You realize that "increasing diversity" is identical to "reduce the representation of non-diverse demographics"? It's a discriminatory policy that examines applicants protected class and treated them different based on their race and gender.

> You seem to claim, however, that a number of commonly accepted, widely adopted, standard policies that companies have used for decades are actually illegal and have been the entire time.

These policies haven't been used for decades. Google only recently including representation quotas - oh, sorry, goals - in performance reviews in 2021. Meta didn't employ the DSA until 2018. These are have not been employed for decades.

> Quota has a specific meaning in these contexts, that among other things includes the concept of including objectively less qualified folks on the basis of the discriminated attribute. So a gendered quota would mean something like hiring the top N applicants from each group, even if for example, there were more qualified men being passed over, and this was actively acknowledged. If it's not doing that, legally speaking, it isn't a quota.

>> Another company tells its executives that their performance reviews will be penalized if their department fails to meet a 35% goal for women in engineering roles.

>This requires deeper analysis: are they hiring only qualified applicants, but making new efforts to appeal and access previously untapped groups of qualified women? Great!

You realize these are the exact same policy? If I penalize my employees if they don't meet a minimum percentage of a protected class, it's the same policy regardless of the specific word uses for the minimum percentage.

"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"

The incentive structure this puts on employees is exactly the same. At this point you're defending quotas, as long as companies use a euphemism for them.

I do agree that these quotas are in common use. But you're wrong that using a euphemism for quotas makes them any different in function.

Throughout your replies, you repeatedly defend the use of non-discriminatory policies that don't treat applicants differently on th basis of protected class, and only involve soliciting more applications from diverse candidates. That's all fine and dandy. But then you turn around and try to defend policies that do discriminate on the basis of race and gender. This doesn't follow. The fact that a quota could theoretically be fulfilled by more aggressively soliciting applicants from the target demographic doesn't change the fact that it's a discriminatory policy. Especially when the quota calls for levels of representation well above the demographics's representation in the field, it's certain to result in biased hiring. And no, simply calling a quota something else doesn't change that fact.

The motte and bailey you've constructed is clear:

The motte: companies should analyze their hiring policies and make sure that candidates are treated no different on the basis of protected class. Yes, I agree.

The Bailey: companies should discriminate on the basis of protected class, including practices like delaying hiring for non-diverse candidates and setting numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class (so long as a word other than "quota" used) is used for those thresholds. No, not only do I not agree, such practices are prohibited by law.