How do you up your numbers of women/ethnic minorities in your organisation without positive discrimination? And was this positive discrimination?

[MrsSchadenfreude]

Well?

A few years ago, I was involved in sifting applications from students in Eastern Europe to study in UK. We judged them initially on a) their "self puff" (why I deserve this scholarship etc etc) and b) their reference from uni. A disproportionate number of men were getting through, due to the fact that a) they were better at self puff than the women and b) professors tended to think the men should get the opportunities.

So we changed the criteria, and gave some weight to what they said they wanted to study and where. The men all lost out because they just put "Masters at LSE/Cambridge/Oxford" whereas the women had researched it properly. the end result was that we interviewed more people, and proportionately more women got through the system.

I gave this as an example at a recent job interview (I got the job!) but was subsequently told that this was positive discrimination. Was it?

What would you do?

I have to say, I didn't see it as such, there was no real reason for the old sift criteria - just "it's always been done this way." So I changed it!

No, it wasn't deliberately designed to recruit more women.

why did you change it? did you do it as you knew it would get more women in?

It could only possibly have been positive discrimination if you had gone through the applications and worked out what women tended to prioritise, and then set the criteria accordingly. If you did it from common sense then you're not to blame for women being more thorough and sorted than blokes, are you? Fwiw, I place quite a lot of weight on well thought out reasons for choices, more so than "PR".

I mean, my understanding is that you had a situation of indirect discrimination that you addressed. And should be applauded for doing so. The new criteria isn't biased. When you say 'proportionately more women got through' do you mean compared to the previous situation? Then that proves your policy to address discrimination worked.

(I'd be very suspicious of the person who thought this was positive discrimination tbh, they'll be telling you you can't recruit women because there aren't enough loos next.)

I thought it unfair that those who had clearly researched what they were going to study and where weren't given any credit for it. When we looked into it, it was almost entirely the women who had bothered to do this. So it was decided first, then we had another look at the applications and realised this was a good way of upping the numbers of women (who were already being discriminated against by their professors).

Yes, Edam, they made up some of the marks they lost in eg the "self puff" which pushed their final tally up so they went through to interview.

then no it's not positive discrimination. i don't know what the word is for it but it was basically a coincidence IYSWIM!

you may be interested to know that when i applied for a graduate job with the NHS all applicants who ticked anything other than white for their ethnicity on their application form were invited to a 2 day coaching course in interview skills and a mock test before the real thing. so there was i with all these other slightly bewildered graduates getting extra help to prepare for our interview because we weren't white.

Oh Dizzy, that's ludicrous! And insulting...

Blimey Dizzy, how did you feel about that?

and discriminatory!

I disagree with most - it was positive discrimination. Anything that tends to favour one group over another due to their membership of that group can be viewed as discrimination. Giving high points to "puff" was positive discrimination in favour of men. However this can quickly become an etymological argument.

You need a lot of good statistics to really measure discrimination, e.g. number of applicants, number of interviews, number of offers (all by sex/race); characteristics of your target population (e.g. there is a lower proportion of ethnic minorities in, say, rural Wales than in central London). To encourage more applicants from under-represented areas, you need to target your advertising - which immediately becomes positive discrimination (by my definition).

Alternatively, get someone not otherwise involved to remove all traces of sex/race from application forms, then get other people to vet the forms.

Dizzy! I have a friend in the civil service, who has an unusual first name and a Nigerian surname as her husband is Nigerian. She is forever being invited on seminars for ethnic minorities - they see the name and they assume.