"You have to employ a woman"

[MatterOfThyme]

Not sure if I'm posting in the right place but feeling really annoyed about this!

DH is recruiting to grow his team. His HR have told him he can ONLY interview women, in order to have equal representation (he already has 2 men on his team). Now, DH couldn't care less if the person he employs is male or female - he's bothered about their experience and aptitude.

As a woman though, this really riles me. It positions women as some sort of pity case. If I got a job purely because the other candidates were men, I'd be livid. DH has had some really excellent men applying and been told he can't interview them because of their gender. Conversely, he's being encouraged to interview completely unsuitable female candidates.

It seems like a sort of reverse-discrimination.

Exactly. It takes time and resources - it’s not individual managers job to solve a problem the company isn’t willing to fix overall.

From what the OP says it's because it revolves around an area of interest that is very male dominated.

So think, a company that manufactures and sells fishing equipment.

So could be sales, but also it's going to want people who are actually knowledgeable and interested in fishing, which is men, by a fair margin. the only solution seems to be to get more women interested in fishing, which I imagine such a company would like to do so they can sell them stuff.

But not really a way to get more applicants now.

And honestly, why should they have to? You can't force women to be interested in fishing (or whatever.)

No it doesn’t mean advertising for women only. It means a company serious about diversity cultivates a relationship with good recruiters and explain to the recruiters they expect quality women to be put forward for every job. Not just women, that part is ridiculous. But not just men either. And the recruiters are expected them to actively look and build profiles of women who might be interested, whether they are actively looking or not, so they can sound them out when jobs come up.
I’d pushback on the women only requirement in your husbands shoes on the basis it’s probably illegal, but both his and your attitude that there aren’t any women around so it’s dumb trying is part of the problem. There are limited women in the area so you need to try harder and might need extra resourcing, and also you might need to consider a slightly different / lower skill set than you had in mind, as you might find that candidate has all the talent you could hope for but hasn’t been given the opportunity by all the other men just like your husband.
im a woman who’s always worked in a male dominated industry. The men and the companies that think diversity matters are magically the ones who find talented women when apparently according to some they just don’t exist. Must be magic.

@Dannexe

Why? You got the same score. They have to decide between you somehow, and if all things are equal and they are low on female managers than that decision makes sense. It’s better than the senior managers auto-hiring in their own image which is what would possibly have happened otherwise.

That is sensible execution of a diversity policy, and you are cutting off your nose to spite your face (something you would be much less likely to catch a bloke doing.)

For many years I was heavily involved in my company's graduate recruitment selection process. I work in engineering which at the time was still dominated by men. We were never told formally that we had to give preference to women grads but it was made very clear 'off the record' that if two candidates were very similar then the woman would get the nod over the man. I was very keen to get more women into the company but the problem we had was the lack of applications from women to begin with. It was only when we cast our net internationally did we start to get a decent number of strong applications from women. I still firmly believe prior to that decision some women applicants were offered positions over stronger male candidates which did not sit well with me.

I'm sure there are ways you could maybe encourage more people from "underrepresented" groups into various things.

But I strongly suspect there's no low-hanging fruit left in a lot of areas. If you're in any sort of sector where there's a significant amount of "DEI" stuff going on in HR, all the change hidden down the back of the sofa (metaphor shift) will have already been scooped up.

Simple efforts on recruitment won't cut it - you would need to be going back and working on apprenticeships or whatever, or sending strong signals to local colleges and universities that they should be trying to encourage certain groups.

(But how far can you go there? Legal fights going on in the US with lots unhappy with universities trying to solve their "too many asians" problem by setting them higher test bars for entry).

And then ultimately you will just hit the basic reality that not all demographic groups are the same. Which is of course the fundamental contradiction - diversity is supposed to be good because different groups have different views. But those different views aren't supposed to in any way influence their choice of career, so every group should be equally represented everywhere? Hmm.

That would be really silly. So you can do the job, you just don’t think it appropriate they consider you for it? How do you know the other man hasn’t got his mate Bob from his last firm who’s a drinking buddy of the role sponsor to put in a good word, naturally predisposing the sponsor to choose him but these silly diversity rules meant he had to look fairly? Industries are small worlds- statistically that’s going to happen during your career, for men anyway.
Almost no one is actually equal on paper despite similarities. Stand down by all means if you want to shoot yourself in the foot but that’s what you would be doing. Go for the job, get the job. Mentor and support other women there and generate a positive environment that attracts women. Be the senior woman interviewing the next candidates- last job I took they were the only ones that had a senior woman in my reporting line, not just an adjacent peer brought in to balance the numbers. Then you can say look what we’ve achieved- we don’t need quotas.

mangy
Yes, I understand that. It's a question the organisation (and possibly the sector) needs to ask and possibly address.

It's simply not good enough to say that women just aren't interested or that they never get any/good applications from women.

From a very early age girls and boys are socialised into education and career choices.

I'm not buying the whole 'women just aren't interested'. Its lazy.

Nobody is forcing women (or men) into careers but it's about making sure they are seen as acceptable and ensuring they are accessible.

The men and the companies that think diversity matters are magically the ones who find talented women when apparently according to some they just don’t exist. Must be magic.

I don't think there's any argument that they don't exist. The question is are there enough for every company to hit a diversity quota. One small company in, say, embedded software engineering, wanting 50/50 male/female programmers might manage it.

Could that be achieved across a significant part of the sector? No. Not with the current employee pool.

(At least not in the UK. Maybe somewhere like India, where there's a different sex ratio in the field.)

So anyway, if the companies that "think diversity matters" are managing to find women, then obviously the ones who don't are going to get even fewer women, because the supply's been hoovered up. The "diversity" company isn't so much increasing the number of women in the field as taking them from the other companies.

It makes a change from employing men because they're men and look how that's all turned out.

It is sex discrimination and it's illegal. It is pretty clear from the OP's description that there is no genuine occupational requirement for the postholder to be female. The organisation can take steps to actively encourage women or other underrepresented groups to apply, but it cannot select on the basis of wanting to hire a female worker.

Our organisation has got a better balance by taking risks

We don't hire many pure coding people - we need data scientists / so we will take someone with the likely capability to learn the coding who has shown other useful generic skills like communication , problem solving

We got an addition the the team who was way below the usual standard, reportedly because we had to have another woman. It just sets them up to fail and leads to suspicion that anyone of any kind of minority is just there to make the numbers look inclusive.

The question is - does HR think he has an unconscious bias problem?

Is he emphasising those skills that will mean he gets more men over other equally important skills ?
Is the job advert pitched at men?
Is he reading a CV that is written in a low key " I helped the team" sort of way as not showing the right skills ?

Only a discussion with HR could uncover that

I feel mixed about this. Obviously as stated the ask from hr is wrong but applaud the sentiment of it. But hear me out on something.

I recruit a lot. One of the big differences I see between male and female applications is how much men will big themselves up on a cv with similar experience compared to a woman. That's even if they apply, there's research to show a woman won't apply for a job until she's 80% confident she can meet the person spec whereas a man will do the same with 20%

Please don't take this as a slight against your husband but I would challenge him to read the cvs again and get a female colleague to also look. It may be that when you get to the facts of the cvs they are more equal and can merit having a more diverse candidate pool.

Also if the HR are that keen to get a female they can use headhunters/agencies to fill the role-always an option at any level just costs more £

Please don't take this as a slight against your husband but I would challenge him to read the cvs again and get a female colleague to also look. It may be that when you get to the facts of the cvs they are more equal and can merit having a more diverse candidate pool.

Absolutely. As a PP mentioned there maybe some unconscious bias at play.
It's really worth unpicking his recruitment and selection processes and making sure everyone involved has been through unconscious bias training.

companies want to be diverse because they will lose business and be judged otherwise. My dh lost a business pitch because he was told his team was not diverse. The team was only 3 people and all were white males. My dh is a white male and most of his work is done in teams of 2 or 3. He is now always sent with a woman (of any race) and/or a man, but the man is not allowed to be white. If this was actually written down as a policy, I’m sure it would be illegal.

Is he shortlisting without knowing what sec the candidates?

This can check unconscious bias and ensure he picks the best candidates

That's positive discrimination, and it's not legal. Sounds like your boss is getting it mixed up with affirmative action?

The thought of people poorly qualified to do jobs all of the country frightens the life out of me!!! I want the best people in the job always.

True, you only have to look at the last three prime ministers to see how much the wrong person for the job can fuck things up so badly 😂

The problem is that a whole range of circumstances - from standard recruitment practices to job design to workplace culture - mean that equally competent women don’t apply to or get many jobs. In fact, they don’t get the precursor jobs so there aren’t the female applicants for more senior roles.

There are lots of systemic (and difficult to address) issues. But just interviewing all the female applicants for a role will not address them.

There seems to have been a spate of ‘how awful; they’re conspiring against men to give women jobs they don’t deserve’ threads on MN recently. Many more so than usual. That is unlikely to be coincidental.

You just said it was a male dominated industry.

If no one gives any of the women the chance to get the experience and qualifications there never will be a change.

It's nothing to do with pity it's to do with women being over looked.

Seriously I cannot believe all the women are sub par and all the men are much better.

If that actually is true then he needs to look at where he is advertising the role.

An it is sex, not gender. That's really important.

@ssashh "An it is sex, not gender. That's really important."

If we're going to be pedantic, if he got a male identifying as a female applying, he'd probably be allowed to employ them as they tick the 'female' box (and a big plus for inclusivity). So...gender.

It's just the way it falls that the female candidates he's had have been lower standard than the men. I find it surprising people are shooketh by this. Interviewing is often a numbers game - you cast your net wide, get some rubbish and some good ones. In this instance, he's had more men apply than women so on balance, more of the men were good. There were some shockers amongst the male candidates too. Had he had more women to look through, there would no doubt have been some good ones.