Female Hiring Targets

Just to point out my own position, I don't support forcing a gender requirement on an individual hire. If the female applicant was clearly going to be sub-par, the interviewing panel shouldn't have put her in the role. It's as cruel to her as it is to the team. But I also think your example here has an element of confirmation bias to it.

First female hire is good = grand stuff, no comment re quotas.

Second female hire turns out to be a bad hire = gender quotas are bad, and serve to screw your employees and customers.

I know you say there were two other candidates that were more suitable, but it's possible that the interviewing panel really did think she was suitable for the role, and it just turned out to be a bad hire. Happens all the time regardless of quotas.

The horror story of quotas is the idea that completely incompetent staff will be hired for no reason other than their gender. If an interviewing panel does this, they're being completely negligent. I'd propose that initiatives to increase the likelihood of female hires should be implemented instead, and tracked with high-level (department to organisation-wide) targets that should be aimed for but which do not impose such a strict requirement that any particular role ends up with an absolute gender requirement.

Well I'm no expert, a company would be best off hiring a consultant or training up a working group to develop initiatives, but I'd guess the most important step would be to include it in the company's CSR objectives, or even include it in the company's values statement and objectives, that they intend to improve gender representation within the company, and then setting those aforementioned targets. That sets expectations.

Follow on tasks from that could include reviewing job specs for bias, making sure there are women included in interview panels, developing internal policies that support women, promoting women's career development, setting up mentoring initiatives, networking groups, reviewing existing policies for bias (especially performance management policies), analysing company culture for improvements.

So a woman with:

• a Masters and
• an inside recommendation from the person previously in the role
• for an open role at a company that lacks women

got through the interview process in one round when the last guy had two. What point is this supporting?

Are you saying that instead of quotas, the panel of interviewers must have been aware/been made aware that their industry disproportionately favoured male hires, so they purposely took a pro-women attitude, and that this was a more effective way to get the right woman into the job instead of just putting 'any woman' into the job? I'd agree there.

Or are you implying that your GF wasn't competent for the role and you think secret quotas got her hired unfairly?

I'd agree that it's not always appropriate, but I do think that where a role/team is identified as having a gender imbalance, it's worth pulling in a woman from another area of the business, just to act as a presence on the panel. Some companies already have a policy that above a certain level of seniority, a HR representative must be on the panel, even if they're not actively asking questions or understand the technical parts of the role. I think a similar policy for female representation could be beneficial. It would have to be situation dependent though, and not detract from the ability to form a core technical panel.

Yeah I'd agree, poor culture is always a risk though. I'd wonder if someone with the right expertise would have a solution for that.