Comment by BeetleB

> and have been historically excluded because of bias (sometimes true, often wholly false - much of the time differential hiring is path dependent with fewer qualified applicants from a given group).

It's very hard to find a company that does real "blind" interviews. And by blind, I mean where networking doesn't positively impact your application.

As long as networking boosts your chances of getting hired somewhere, you've got a very wide open door to biases, because networks are almost always biased. I should not be able to give me resume to a friend to ensure the hiring manager gets to see it. Yet I haven't found a company where that behavior is detrimental.