If applications have diversity goals, and ask for your demographic, how can they claim that your response won’t subject you to adverse treatment/ affect your application? Aren’t your demographics taken into direct consideration when targeting those diversity goals, either for better or worse?

Question

If applications have diversity goals, and ask for your demographic, how can they claim that your response won’t subject you to adverse treatment/ affect your application? Aren’t your demographics taken into direct consideration when targeting those diversity goals, either for better or worse?

In: Other

Answer 1

Obviously it depends on the specific circumstance. But in general, the “correct” way to do this is that the data is gathered, is *not* used at hiring time, but then *is* analyzed retroactively – e.g. “over the last six months, what was our hiring ratio by gender?”. They use that analysis to determine whether there are potential biases that need to be corrected; if they identify a bias, they work on finding its cause and resolving it.