Are forced gender distributions for hiring interns legal?

Question

A hypothetical company offers an engineering internship program. This company's applicant pool has a ~80%/20% gender distribution (which is consistent with engineering student enrollment). However, this company's hired intern class consistently has a ~50%/50% gender distribution. Such a distribution cannot be achieved via random selection from the applicant pool, unless either the minority gender was much stronger than the majority gender, or the distribution was somehow "forced" during the hiring process. Is this legal?

thejteam · Accepted Answer

Completely hypothetical... two ways this could happen and not be "forced". One, as you said the minority gender could be stronger "on average". Which could happen if the reason why the applicant pool is skewed is historic discrimination. This could discourage all but the stronger applicants from the minority gender. The top X% of the applicant pool would then be evenly distributed, while the bottom portion of the applicant pool is weighted towards the majority.
Or...
Applicants are not applying to only 1 location. If other companies have discriminatory hiring practices (whether intentional or not) but this company doesn't, then the applicants that accept an offer could skew more towards the minority group (since the majority group was more likely to get a higher paying offer or any offer at all).

aynyc · Answer

Legal is a stupid question. Even if it&rsquo;s illegal, are you willing to bring it to court in any shape or form? The answer is no unless you want to be a martyr.Take it to HR and you&rsquo;ll be on PIP in a few months or on the layoff list.

MarkMc · Answer

The company might claim that the minority gender is in fact 'stronger' because a diverse workforce performs better.

torstenvl · Answer

Besides the fact that legal advice over public Internet forums can't possibly work, laws are specific to the jurisdictions they're in. What might be legal in one country/state may be illegal in another country/state.To get better results from questions like these, I encourage you to (a) specify what state/country you're talking about; and (b) clarify that you're only looking for a general direction for your own further research, not seeking legal advice.

altairprime · Answer

Basically, it&rsquo;s legal in the United States if the practice reduces overall inequity. If the company were 100/0 split and at least two times larger in total workers than the 80/20 applicant pool, then they could hire exclusively from the 20% until they&rsquo;ve reduced their split to 50/50.(I am not your lawyer, this is not legal advice, I will not be providing citations.)