Yeah, unfortunately the preceding fifty years where you kept hiring those possessing a penis and white skin meant you kind of lost the right to be trusted to just "hire the best candidate".

You're quite right. I was thinking of male/female, not man/woman.

I'm just asking the question. Do you actually keep records and check them? Or do you just assume you couldn't possibly be biased in any way, at any stage? No, employers are not the only weak link in the chain. Doesn't mean they are never a problem. I also work in a STEM-heavy industry - not IT - and diversity in hiring isn't an issue for us because we work extremely hard at it.

You are correct in aggregate - of course companies cannot hire people who don't exist - but I really struggle to believe that *Google* has 17% female application rates after controlling for education.

No. The point of it is a dig against those who like to treat women as a single homogeneous group with identical thoughts and opinions. Given that man and woman have different etymologies (really) it's a fairly daft idea.

So why is there such a disparity between Google & Yahoo's female proportions? Seriously, none of this shit passes the smell test. Women don't want to do this. Black people don't like doing that. It's utter bullshit from top to bottom. It's not nice to admit there is a massive fucking problem here but the first step really is admitting it.

I am saying the problem is complex and requires some study before one can even have an informed understanding, much less have a strong opinion on it.

Does your company actually track applicants through to hiring to actually prove that women don't apply? Or is this something you just tell yourself to make y'all feel better?

If you say the most qualified get jobs, and the jobs are going to men, then the women most be less qualified. No? All I am asking is for you to back that statement up: either show women are underqualified/less motivated. The alternative is that job allocation is actually not 100% meritocratic.

Given that the Yahoos of this world have the pick of the graduate pool (and they don't just hire CS graduates) I'd say that might not be the only thing going on here.

Can you provide some evidence that the wimmin and minorities are neither motivated nor qualified?

Gosh, I wish I had years of training in multi-jurisdictional legal practice in order to be able to make such bold and sweeping statements.

I'm British. We don't subsidise as heavily as heavily as some European countries and we have much more mixed funding, but I'm still not keen on cultural subsidy. Not least because it picks winners and losers - traditional music? Screw you, here's a few million quid for opera. Broad based subsidy via tax law is one thing but throwing millions at 17th century art music sticks in my craw.

Sorry, but I really struggle with the idea that government should be in the business of funding culture. And moreover, this is about introducing new productions, not slimming down old ones.

This is not a case of dispensing with the musicians to make money, this is about staging opera in a time and place where there is no way you could afford to produce a full scale production. And it's not like the avant garde of opera isn't already neck deep in digital production anyway; the ENO has produced stuff like Sunken Garden which integrated orchestra and digital music throughout, and done it brilliantly (from a technical point of view; the show itself was dross).