Sopwiths North
Canadia Roo
If you do the actual numbers the Gender equality action plan quota means the club expects to employ 6 or 7 more women than it does now across the future. So its not a massive thing.
But I understand your concern about "best available person".
Here's a reference to a study.
Here's some quotes from it:
"How Stereotypes Impair Women's Careers in Science," written by Ernesto Reuben, assistant professor of management at Columbia Business School, and recently published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals the underlying biases of hiring managers, and also demonstrates the cost of discrimination.
"Studies that seek to answer why there are more men than women in STEM fields typically focus on women's interests and choices," said Professor Reuben. "This may be important, but our experiments show that another culprit of this phenomenon is that hiring managers possess an extraordinary level of gender bias when making decisions and filling positions, often times choosing the less qualified male over a superiorly qualified female."
In an experiment in which participants were hired to perform a mathematical task, both male and female managers were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman -- even when the managers had no information beyond a candidate's appearance and, therefore, gender.
...
The experiment, done on both female and male hiring managers showed that when the hiring manager had no other information other than a candidate's gender, they were twice as likely to hire a man than a woman, because they incorrectly believed that men are more talented in science and math, the researchers found. This bias often led to hiring the less-capable job seeker.
"In some situations up to ninety percent of the time when a mistake was made, it was made in favor of a man," Reuben says.
Even more surprising was when the candidates were allowed to tell the managers how well they will perform; women were still only half as likely to be hired as men, the study showed. Unlike men, women who indicated that they will score higher that their competitors were overlooked. With these mathematical test scores in hand, the researchers were able to prove a tangible cost to discrimination of hiring managers.
...
Further versions of the experiment demonstrated the difficulties of confronting negative stereotypes. When hiring managers were given information about the candidates' actual performance, the bias against women was reduced, but not eliminated, the researchers found.
There you go.
Someone did a study on hiring practises and found that without quotas people don't hire the best candidate for the job cos they'd rather hire men.
Bloody science and its left wing bias.
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