&gt; That point you&#x27;ve apparently missed is that current hiring practises among some companies can be discriminatory.<p>Yes, I know they are. My question (&quot;Will the bet on minority over competence will yield greater gains in the long run?&quot;) was genuine; I really wish I knew if positive discrimination to counteract the existing discrimination will improve the situation.<p>&gt; All that said though, I don&#x27;t believe there&#x27;s any actual evidence that people end up hiring less-than-competent people because of quotas.<p>Evidence? Maybe not. But believe me, there are quotas with perfidious results in large companies. I&#x27;ve seen it happen somewhat like this: department X has 5 vacancies to fill; due to department &quot;demographics&quot;, company mandates that 3 of the 5 vacancies are for female candidates; due to candidates &quot;demographics&quot;, department X ends with a pool of N candidates for 3 vacancies and another pool of 10N for the other 2.<p>But, as you said, it&#x27;s theoretical. If the candidates had a quantifiable &quot;skill&quot;, the &quot;no subpools&quot; approach would yield better results - a bigger &quot;skill&quot; quantity for the total of vacancies. However, in practice, you can&#x27;t quantify skill, and much less the impact a candidate will have in the department. The apparently sub-optimal &quot;subpools&quot; approach might get the 5 vacancies with &quot;more than enough&quot; skill; The apparently sub-optimal &quot;subpools&quot; might even yield better results due to e.g. diversity. That&#x27;s why I said that this is a question for the ages - only cohort-like analysis of hiring practices will give us something close to a answer which isn&#x27;t merely speculative.