Common sense would tell you it does happen. It only takes one guy who&#x27;d rather hire a man than a woman and one qualified woman applying for that job.<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s a meaningfully large part of the explanation for the skewed distribution. I think there are deeper systemic issues for that. However, I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve seen more than a handful of people say that quotas are in place because of discrimination either. From my experiences, I think my view here is by far the dominant one -- there is overt discrimination, but the bigger factor is more subtle. It&#x27;s primary and secondary education, culture, socioeconomics, marketing and advertising to kids, in short, a bunch of stuff that serve to skew the pool of people even getting to the point of <i>wanting</i> tech jobs. Quotas aren&#x27;t aimed at getting Klansmen to have to grit their teeth and hire a black guy. Quotas are an attempt to bootstrap the system -- maybe if we just dump a larger than normal population of minorities into our little world, it&#x27;ll self-propagate through more minorities seeing this as a viable option, with the hope that a generation or two from now, you&#x27;ll have the distribution you want naturally.