This issue came up on Less Wrong before, and I will reiterate the advice I gave there: if a forbidden criteria affects a hiring decision, keep your reasons secret and shred your work. The linked article is about a case where the University of Kentucky was forced to pay $125,000 to an applicant, Martin Gaskell. This happened because the chairman of the search committee, Michael Cavagnero, was stupid enough to write this in a logged email:
If Martin were not so superbly qualified, so breathtakingly above the other applicants in background and experience, then our decision would be much simpler. We could easily choose another applicant, and we could content ourselves with the idea that Martin’s religious beliefs played little role in our decision. However, this is not the case. As it is, no objective observer could possibly believe that we excluded Martin on any basis other than religious...
And that’s where the trouble starts, because Martin Gaskell’s religious beliefs would have been a serious risk to the university’s reputation. No one would take a creationist seriously as an astronomer, and no one would take an observatory seriously if one of the first few Google results for its name connected it to creationism.
Which is why, as soon as they realized they had a creationist as a potentially leading candidate, they should have moved their hiring process into private meetings with poor note-taking, and started looking for better pretexts. Yes, anti-discrimination laws are crazy, but not all judges are. However, a judge can only work around craziness if you allow a suitable pretext, which means not discussing how you need to break the crazy laws in writing.
The problem is that some, if not most, of the forbidden criteria carry real and useful information, hence there is a ever growing (proportional to the heavy handedness of government or corporate regulations) incentive to find creative ways to covertly take them into account.
Best person for the job =/= best qualified judging only by the allowed criteria
This issue came up on Less Wrong before, and I will reiterate the advice I gave there: if a forbidden criteria affects a hiring decision, keep your reasons secret and shred your work. The linked article is about a case where the University of Kentucky was forced to pay $125,000 to an applicant, Martin Gaskell. This happened because the chairman of the search committee, Michael Cavagnero, was stupid enough to write this in a logged email:
And that’s where the trouble starts, because Martin Gaskell’s religious beliefs would have been a serious risk to the university’s reputation. No one would take a creationist seriously as an astronomer, and no one would take an observatory seriously if one of the first few Google results for its name connected it to creationism.
Which is why, as soon as they realized they had a creationist as a potentially leading candidate, they should have moved their hiring process into private meetings with poor note-taking, and started looking for better pretexts. Yes, anti-discrimination laws are crazy, but not all judges are. However, a judge can only work around craziness if you allow a suitable pretext, which means not discussing how you need to break the crazy laws in writing.
Either that or they could just hire the best qualified candidate for the job.
The problem is that some, if not most, of the forbidden criteria carry real and useful information, hence there is a ever growing (proportional to the heavy handedness of government or corporate regulations) incentive to find creative ways to covertly take them into account.
Best person for the job =/= best qualified judging only by the allowed criteria