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Comment by Manuel_D

1 hour ago

They settled out of court, YouTube didn't prevail in court. The evidence speaks for itself. Did you not read the emails that plaintiff's manager sent, explicitly telling him to cancel all non-diverse applicants' interviews?

You can read the complaint itself: https://regmedia.co.uk/2018/03/02/wilberg-v-google.pdf

> Please continue with L3 candidates in process and only accept new L3 candidates that are from historically underrepresented groups.

> We are still pre-Goodburger roll out, so that means the only candidates that need pre-allocation are L3s. And we should only consider L3s from our underrepresented groups.

Engage with the evidence of the lawsuit before proclaiming that it's meritless because YouTube settled with the plaintiff, rather than going to court and losing. If these emails were fabricated YouTube would have a slam-dunk case against the plaintiff. But they chose to settle.

> In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas

The incentives were implemented in the form of quotas. You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things, when they're not.

"Your salary is $110,000. If you don't meet a quota of 40% women, I'm docking our pay by $10,000 as a penalty for failing to meet this quota."

"Your salary is $100,000. Because we want to make the company more diverse, we're giving a $10,000 bonus for reaching an inclusion milestone of 40% women."

This is exactly what Intel did, from the Atlantic article:

> But in the past couple of years, Intel decided to try a few other approaches, including hiring quotas.

> Well, not quotas. You can’t say quotas. At least not in the United States. In some European countries, like Norway, real, actual quotas—for example, a rule saying that 40 percent of a public company’s board members must be female—have worked well; qualified women have been found and the Earth has continued turning. However, in the U.S., hiring quotas are illegal. “We never use the word quota at Intel,” says Danielle Brown, the company’s chief diversity and inclusion officer. Rather, Intel set extremely firm hiring goals. For 2015, it wanted 40 percent of hires to be female or underrepresented minorities.

> Now, it’s true that lots of companies have hiring goals. But to make its goals a little more, well, quota-like, Intel introduced money into the equation. In Intel’s annual performance-bonus plan, success in meeting diversity goals factors into whether the company gives employees an across-the-board bonus. (The amounts vary widely but can be substantial.) If diversity efforts succeed, everybody at the company gets a little bit richer.

> You're writing as though these are mutually exclusive things

That's how the law sees it.

  • When has the court upheld a policy of setting a specific percentage racial or gender quota, and penalizing employees financially if that quota is not met? If I told my employees "I'll reduce your pay by 90% if you hire any pregnant women" that's not discrimination against gender and family status? You really think a court would buy this argument? Of course, 90% is a much bigger proportion of salary than the DEI bonuses in the example above, but fundamentally this is no different of a policy - it's still tying compensation to the protected class of hired candidates.

    And again, you're still glossing over the other two examples: A manager at YouTube explicitly directed a recruiter to only proceed with diverse applicants. And Perkins Coie did, in fact, restrict eligibility for its fellowship program on the basis of race and sexual orientation (this was settled in 2023 after they agreed to stop discriminating. The 2025 judgement you linked above doesn't in any way defend Perkins Coie's hiring policies, only that Trump couldn't further punish them by banning them from federal buildings).

    • > When has the court upheld a policy of setting a specific percentage racial or gender quota, and penalizing employees financially if that quota is not met?

      Irrelevant.

      > And again, you're still glossing over the other two examples

      Two examples is not a pervasive problem in my opinion, so it's super easy to gloss over.

      What is a pervasive problem is the tables being very tilted against certain groups of people.

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