A lot of investigators are completely incompetent and the job has one of the lowest pay of any cleared jobs out there. My investigator didn't realize I was male until he had interviewed a friend of mine and corrected him.
I cant see anyone letting something like this hit the public on purpose, big HR slip, but its certainly interesting insight to the hiring manager / person who wrote the job description.
If i were to go into that interview as not a man, i would feel disadvantaged.
How could the selection process be gender blind when she knew some of the applicants? Surely she would be able to tell who each individual was when she was going through the applications.
> “A key challenge is that when much of the information in the application has been hidden, it’s hard to establish a clear picture of the know-how and capability of the applicant,” the city’s resolution says.
What exactly do you learn about a candidate's know-how and capability by knowing their name, gender, etc? Unless you are so deep in denial that you'd just blatantly say "Men are more capable than women".
I didn't mean to imply the males I worked with weren't equally good. I was simply pointing out that, in my (anecdotal) experience, I couldn't see any reason non-males couldn't do the job well.
I've encountered something similar. Basically two roles were open and I was on the interviewing team. We were told at the start that one of the roles would be for a woman. We got two CVs from women, and about 45 or so from guys. Not fair really but what can you do. It'd be insanity to challenge that, so just keep your head down and nod along.
I believe the inquiry was to determine whether discrimination against female applicants was starting to happen as a way to redress the male/female imbalance.
The person they're asking said that they dedicated a extra resources to try and hire female candidates because the office was all males. That implies that they were hiring specifically for gender, not for any specific skillset.
I used to work on a medical technician team of five as the only male. We had to replace one of the women who left, so put out an ad. We all went through the resumes, and there were two with the techincal skills, both female. Everyone agreed on getting in those two. There was a third candidate who didn't have the proper tech skills, but he did have 'has appeared as a model on TV on this show and that show'. He was given an interview based on this line - my colleagues wanted to see the eye-candy, even though they denied it - there were women with better skill matches than this guy (though only the initial two had the right matches out of all). This guy got dragged into a job interview solely so the women could check him out physically; he was never going to get the job.
This line of reasoning doesn't hold up. It's just as easy to flip your conclusion on it's head currently; any given member of a majority group could be viewed as only being hired because of internal biases, not merit.
To contribute my own, relatively unique, anecdote, Ive interviewed both as a man and as a woman and the process is considerably easier when you just get to coast through on the "white nerdy guy, must know tech" stereotype.
It took us 4 months to hire a woman to our team while we wasted the time of over a dozen qualified men interviewing people we knew we would not hire. I found this deeply distasteful.
It's not a conscious choice people make. It's a subjective perception issue, which is harder to fix. Example: In a room with a male and a female founder, most people will ask the male for technical help, while assuming the female is less competent technically. Interviews are highly subjective, so is wage determination.
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