> That doesn't make it discriminatory, it just meant that the representation of non-Catholics was previously inflated by the discriminatory suppression of 50% of Catholic applicants. I'm not sure why this is hard to comprehend.

No no, I fully agree with you here. I just also continue this train of thought to say that doing the same thing by removing discriminatory hiring practices that were suppressing the hiring of women and URM applicants is also reducing discrimination. But somehow you seem to consistently disagree at that point.

To build on your example, imagine that the company doesn't immediately realize that their hiring process is tossing out resumes. They think it's working fine. Someone comes along and says "hey, your hiring of Catholics is surprisingly low compared to what we would expect." The company investigates and agrees. They realize it's not actually due to the system throwing out 50% of Catholic's resumes, but instead some automated screening software that misinterprets language that Catholics use and throws out a disproportionate number of their applications. Unfortunately, this system is extremely effective in other cases, so the company can't actually just entirely stop using it, or they'd be unable to effectively screen candidates at all.

The company devises a plan, with a measurable goal to increase employment among Catholics by 10% by the end of the year. They re-review some Catholic resumes resumes, and proactively reach out to some applicants who had been denied and re-interview them. They put some additional systems in place to manually review new incoming resumes by Catholic applicants. They work with the automated resume screening software provider to improve the software and stop rejecting the applicants. They reach out to Loyola and Georgetown and ensure that the students at these traditionally Catholic universities have some additional training on how to write their resumes in a way that gets past the screening software.

This all seems fine and good, both morally and legally, to me. Where do you land?

> You cannot deny, nor delay,

> I explain how it discriminates on the basis of protected class here:

I don't actually see any justification for saying a delayed hiring process would be discriminatory. Unless you were to try and claim that the intent of the delay were to get non-diverse applicants to leave the hiring pool, there are pretty reasonable business justifications, such as "any hiring process that is unable to find even a single potentially qualified minority applicant is probably irrevocably flawed."

To zero in on your Meta example, unless you can show that the hiring process was noticeable longer for some candidates than others, which I find deeply unlikely, the more reasonable explanation than your handwavy suggestion that

> But the way it "improved" the demographics of Meta was through systematically delaying offers on the basis of protected class.

is that it improved demographics by exposing decision makers (Hiring Managers) to more qualified applicants from diverse backgrounds. To phrase this differently: if we return to our Catholic example, if you implement a requirement that all roles must consider a Catholic, and this encourages recruiters to actively reach out to catholic hires, some of the folks who were autorejected by the screening process will be found despite being missed the first time.

> It was never even allowed by law.

I want to clarify, you are saying that the Department of Labor guidance as defined under https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_11246, which has been the Department of Labor policy for 60 years now, is unlawful, and has been for 60 years, through multiple administrations on both sides of the aisle? Because that seems like it is beyond the pale of a reasonable understanding of the law. Of course it was (and still is) legal for companies to have diversity goals.

Given that the EO doesn't change the underlying law, while it is obviously no longer necessary for companies to comply, what they were doing before was clearly lawful and they can continue to do it!

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

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!

> This isn't a hypothetical example. Your own company created such a policy: https://www.reuters.com/technology/google-evaluate-executive... I wouldn't be surprised if Google does away with these totally-not-quotas the same way Meta ditched the DSA.

What Meta chooses to do or not is totally up to them, but they are not the arbiters of legality. This policy was implemented in the previous Trump admin. It was legal then. It's legal now.

> Whether you call them "goals" or "representation targets" or "diversity milestones", whenever you define success and failure in terms of numerical thresholds on the basis of protected class, it's almost certainly going to incentivize discrimination.

Put simply, I disagree. There are all sorts of ways to improve representation that aren't illegal. 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. You understand why that causes me to doubt your reliability as an arbiter of what legal vs. illegal discrimination is, right?

Like, when you say "in my experience companies are simply ignoring these laws and adopting quotas or other discriminatory practices anyway", and I see the things you object to, which aren't quotas and aren't illegal, and have in some cases survived judicial review, and in some cases, are explicitly required by the government (see, for example, the consent decree in https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/radiant-services-pay-11-millio..., which requires "a recruitment plan and meet hiring goals to recruit, hire or place workers that reflect the percentage of non-Hispanic hires that would be expected based on the composition of the relevant labor pool"), you're saying that the actively practiced interpretation of the Title VII and the EEOC's practice for decades now is requiring illegal discrimination, and that's clearly untrue. You just disagree with the government on the specific kinds of discrimination that should be illegal, and that's fine, but you also shouldn't mislead people and claim that companies are doing things that are unlawful when they are just doing things you disprefer.