How Lever (YC S12) Got to 50–50 Women and Men
This progressive-SV obsession with diversity is a pretty odd shibboleth from an outsider&#x27;s perspective.  Why do companies set this as a goal for themselves, or brag about it?<p>There are only three ways to have a workforce significantly more diverse than your applicant pool:<p>1) Get lucky, and have the best candidates just happen to have the particular immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job.  In which case, congratulations?  But it&#x27;s nothing to brag about.  And it&#x27;s only possible for low-n.  The law of averages will wipe it out sooner or later.<p>2) Intentionally hire suboptimal candidates because they have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job.  Congratulations, you made your company worse.<p>3) Spend an inordinate amount of time interviewing candidates in order to find ones who are both excellent <i>and</i> have the immutable characteristics of birth you think qualify them for a job.  Congratulations, you made your company worse.  Time and effort are finite resources and you should have been spending yours building better products and connecting with your customers.<p>All this, for what?  Plaudits in the tech press?  <i>Maybe</i> attracting investment from VC firms that say they want their companies to employ people with a wide range of immutable characteristics of birth?  You haven&#x27;t made your products better, and you haven&#x27;t connected with your customers more.  You&#x27;ve either hired a worse team or wasted your time.<p>If, for sufficiently large n, your workforce does not look like your applicant pool, you have broken hiring practices.