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Positive discrimination is still discrimination.

Equality is equally (sorry!) not "we have 50% female staff".

Now... I describe my stance as pro-underdog. I get that women are getting a duff deal and aren't on an even footing. But I don't see that shoving them into jobs where they haven't competed on an equal basis to get them is doing anyone any favours. The same for disabled, minorities, etc.

If you put women in the position in preference to men, in order to try to maintain some artificial ratio, that's just going to make people resent them, which will make their jobs harder.

Fred and Philis both apply for the same job, same experience, same qualifications, etc. Philis gets it "because we need more women"? No.

If you want to do this, and do it properly - double-blind interviews. Have the candidates prepare a CV and then strip age, gender, name (often indicator of gender) out of it entirely. The HR department provide made-impartial CVs with code numbers. They're reviewed by an interview panel, and a list of code numbers are invited to interview. HR doesn't even need to know the code-numbers! It could all be automated - "#6 is through to the next stage, send Stage 2 email to invite them to interview".

The candidates are invited to interview, but not in-person. I mean, it's 2020. Live-chat it. They can do that from the HR department if necessary - candidate comes in, someone verifies their identity, sticks them in front of a computer, the people actually *interviewing* have no idea who they are interviewing but get a chat window to ask questions.

You know it's the candidate and not someone else.

They still have to think on their feet and provide answers to arbitrary questions.

You still have their CV to refer to.

It removes all indicators that they are maybe a stutterer, in a wheelchair, have a birthmark, are blind even, black, a woman, whatever it is that you don't want to be accused of discriminating against.

If they have to interview from home for whatever reason, send your HR person to them with a laptop. Nobody will ever know. And if their physical condition doesn't affect the ability to do the job... who cares? Nobody can discriminate against you on that basis.

And if you have difficulty with keyboards, dyslexia etc. - well HR can transcribe what you say for you if it's not affecting the job you're being asked to do.

Maybe the HR section can then make a sanitised recommendation based on the other tangible factors, say, attire worn to interview, visible tattoos, pleasant greeting, whatever it is that you want to look at. And then any statement that needs to be made that is relevant to the job is revealed later: "This person is unable to walk or lift heavy items". "#6 was pleasant, well-dressed (without saying what in), arrived early."

Then this literally isolates you legally in terms of discrimination. There's nothing more you could possibly do. You'd never have a lawsuit again and could provide all kinds of historical data to prove it. Hell, it might even reveal internal prejudices - how many candidates were rejected and were female? How many candidates were rejected but didn't have a degree? Gather that data, analyse it, and it tells you whether people just weren't suited to the job (but just happened to be female) or whether you were subconsciously rejecting perfectly-fitting candidates just because they were female before.

It's this "I'm a better judge of someone face-to-face" nonsense that really kills a company's workforce. I've worked with any number of people who can convince people of anything, but are useless at the job. Because they were interviewed face-to-face and were "our kind" of people.

Think how many prejudices you could weed out almost instantly. From "This guy has a lisp" to "This guy is paraplegic". Who cares? Can he do the job?