The fact that the company is majority white does not make discrimination legal. If the Perkins Coie wants to do things like anonymize its interviews, or send fake interview packets to its recruiters and looking for disparities in call back rates then that would be a genuine attempt at identifying potential discrimination.

the discrimination already happened! it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating. it's curious that the status quo isn't nearly as concerning.

> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating?

This is untrue, though. The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population is not evidence of discrimination.

In fact, you can end up with disparities much larger without discrimination. It's even possible to actively discriminate against a group, and still have that disadvantaged group be overrepresented by a factor of 3 or 4.

That was the case with the Harvard admissions lawsuit. Even though the university was actively discriminating against Asian applicants, the undergrad population was ~20% Asian, despite ~6% of the applicants being Asian.

>The fact that a company does not have representation that is exactly equitable with the general population

i didn't say exactly equitable, i said 80%. it's not possible to have 80% white guys and not be discriminatory.

you're making a bad faith apples to oranges comparison, to say nothing of the merit of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. your viewpoint and disinterest is very clear, i don't know why you even bother arguing about it.

Yes, it is possible to have an 80% white organization without discrimination. Perkins Coie is ~80% white but is gender representation is much closer to parity [1], so I'm not sure why you're referring specifically to "white guys".

The relevance of SFFA vs. Harvard is to demonstrate that it's possible to have a substantial overrepresentation - over 3x in the case of Asians at Harvard - despite actively discriminating against the overrepresented group. Whites are only ~1.2x more common at Perkins Coie relative to the general population.

You can keep repeating the line that because a company has X% of Y race it must be evidence of discrimination as many times as you want, repetition doesn't make it true.

1. https://perkinscoie.com/about-us

not going to debate bad faith right wing cause celebres arguing the inverse.

i see it with my own two eyes when i have to yell at recruiters to stop bringing me all-male candidate slates, i see it from studies in social sciences, and i know it from having seen the progression over my own career and listening to my female colleagues. at the end of the day a lot of men don't see women and minorities as people with full agency.

If you did a cursory review of the social sciences on this topic, you'd know that the demographics of people going through the prerequisites to working at a place like Perkins Coie does not match the general population. College attendance has racial disparities, as does law school attendance. Whites have half and 1/3rd the fail rate at the bar examination as compared to Latin and Black people respectively. Even absent discrimination, there are plenty of factors that drive law firms to have larger representation of white people.

> it's not possible to end up 80% white guy without discriminating.

That is not remotely true. Individual choices, as well as experiences which shape the candidate pool, can cause such lopsided numbers. In my view, the single biggest problem with the (quite well intentioned) diversity initiatives is that they assume, without evidence, that any organization with lopsided demographics must therefore be discriminating. But that is a fallacy and undermines the entire endeavor they are engaged in.

there's loads of evidence, y'all just don't like engaging with it cos you don't like the answer because fixing it is work and fundamentally women and minorities are not seen as people with full agency.

i'm old enough to remember when software engineering conferences were _2%_ female. it's exhausting to be having this same conversation decades later.

What is the evidence? Did we send identical applications, differing only by ethnicity, to Perkins Coie, and did they respond to the non-white applicants at lower rates? Did Perkins Coie institute policies like withholding bonuses if leaders hired too few white applicants? What indicates that Perkins Coie is preferring white applicants over equally qualified Black or Latin applicants?

You insist there's evidence of discrimination, but all you've done is point to the % of white people at the company and insist it's too high.

But as a counterpoint, 40% of the developers at my company are Asian, despite them making up 6% of the US population. That's an overrepresentation of over 6X. In fact, whites are slightly underrepresented. Does that mean we're discriminating against non-asians? Is this evidence that whites are discriminated again, on account of their underrepresentation? Of course not.

YouTube was never found guilty of anything, they just paid to make the argument go away. In the case of Intel and Microsoft you're conflating incentives with quotas. These companies wanted more diversity in their staff, which is a valid and laudable goal, and they were willing to pay extra if that was achieved.

Would you like to try again?

edit: your later addition of Perkins Coie also was settled/dismissed and never adjudicated, and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].

The real takeaway is that a lot of people are very mad about what they imagine DEI to be.

[1] https://www.perkinscoiefacts.com/filings/memorandum-opinion-...

Yes, the lawsuit against Perkings Coie was dropped, after the law firm agreed to stop engaging in discrimination. As per the case, Parkins Coie did explicitly require that applicants to its diversity fellowship be Black, Latin, or a member of the LGBTQ community. The lawsuit was dropped after Perkins Coie agreed to expand eligibility to all applicants, regardless of race and sexual orientation.

What about the Perkins Coie lawsuit serves to highlight the notion that DEI is often implemented through discriminatory manners? Do you deny the eligibility criteria that Perkins Coie set for its diversity fellowship.

> and the executive order which claimed to penalize them for discrimination, which was adjudicated later, was a summary judgment in their favor[1].

This judgement is largely unrelated to their discriminatory fellowship requirements. The lawsuit about the fellowship was resolved in 2023, before Trump took office. This was a judgement against Trump's executive order - it is not a judgement of Perkins Coie's employment practices before he took office.

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.

If the courts haven't found in favor of companies using quotas as incentives, then you have no basis to claim that that quotas are legally acceptable as long as they're framed as incentives. This is directly relevant to your claims.

I find it noteworthy how often proponents of DEI talk in vague, euphemistic terms. You left me to guess what you mean by "certain groups of people". The group that I've witnessed benefit the most from DEI in tech companies is women - not Black people, or poor people. And the experimental evidence on the gender disparity in tech company recruiting does not back up the idea that women are disadvantaged when it comes to applying to tech companies: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID3946621_cod...

> If the courts haven't found in favor of companies using quotas as incentives

The courts don’t conflate these activities and as we’ve discussed, recruiting incentives related to broadening the applicant pool are perfectly legal and proper. This has nothing to do with hiring unqualified people based on identity as you imply. Hope this helps.

> The courts don’t conflate these activities and as we’ve discussed

Again, what is the basis of this statement? You're not actually backing this claim up with anything, you're just postulating it as fact. From what I can find, companies are being sued for this practice: https://nfclegal.com/dei-legal-development-spotlight-warm-up...

> Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier filed a lawsuit accusing Starbucks Corp. of violating state civil rights through its DEI policies by: ... Tying executive compensation to participation in race-based mentorship programs and race-based employee retention rates; and

I have not been able to find a single instance of a company successfully defending a policy of tying compensation to race and gender quotas. Your claim that the courts have given the green light on tying compensation to racial and gender quotas is not the consensus I'm finding.

> recruiting incentives related to broadening the applicant pool are perfectly legal and proper.

Tying compensation to quotas also incentivizes narrowing the applicant pool to exclude the demographic that doesn't belong to the quota. Again, if I told my employees, "I'm docking your pay if you hire any pregnant women", am I broadening the applicant pool to include more non-pregnant people? Or am I incentivizing them to narrow the applicant pool to exclude pregnant women? "Diversity goals" and caps are two sides of the same coin. Tying a bonus to a diversity goal X% women is the same as instituting a penalty if a cap of (100-X)% men is exceeded.

Remember, Microsoft and Intel tied quotas to proportional representation. If I have 8 men and 2 women on my candidate docket, and I need to reach 40% women, I could try and attract 3 more female applicants. But if the desired female applicants don't materialize, I could also decline to hire some of the men to push women's proportional representation up enough to reach the 40% quota. I can't guarantee whether more women apply to join the team, but I can unilaterally decline to move forward with some of the men.

> This has nothing to do with hiring unqualified people based on identity as you imply

Where did I write about unqualified people getting hired? I've re-read my comments twice, and nowhere do I imply that people are hired based on identify characteristics.

I've found that this is a common theme among DEI proponents: try and imply that people who highlight the existence of discriminatory policies as denigrating the qualifications of the groups favored by DEI preferences. I have generally not witnessed unqualified applicants being hired on account of DEI discrimination, rather it's mostly qualified men that aren't getting interviewed in order to prop up female representation percentages.

> I have not been able to find a single instance of a company successfully defending a policy of tying compensation to race and gender quotas.

Simply repeating the conflation of quotas with incentives ad nauseam doesn't make them the same thing.

And for the fifth time, incentives and quotas are not mutually exclusive. A company can create incentives that are implemented through quotas.

"Your salary is $100k. If you don't meet a quota of X% women I'm reducing your pay by $50k."

"Your salary is $50k. But I'm offering an incentive of $50k if you meet a quo... - excuse me - diversity goal of X% women."

You can keep repeating that this isn't a quota as long as you call it an "incentive", but anyone engaging in good faith sees it for what it is: it's setting a specific numeric quota on the basis of protected class, and penalizing workers who don't meet that quota.

In fact IBM was sued and paid a settlement of over $17 million for tying compensation to diversity metrics: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/ibm-pays-17-million-resolve-a...

> The United States alleged that IBM took race, color, national origin, or sex into account when making employment decisions, including by using a diversity modifier that tied bonus compensation to achieving demographic targets.

> In fact IBM was sued and paid a settlement of over $17 million for tying compensation to diversity metrics:

That's one way of putting it.

Another way is IBM bribed Trump's personal lawyer 17 million in furtherance of Trump's hobby horse, bigotry, in exchange for a billion dollars[1].

> [May 21, 2026 5:25PM] The largest recipient is IBM, which is slated to receive $1 billion

[1] https://www.cato.org/blog/trumps-presidential-portfolio-goes...

Bigotry does not mean an automatic win at court. I continue to be impressed at the mental gymnastics you're willing to jump through to rationalize the belief that tying compensation to racial and gender quotas is legal. It doesn't matter that companies are being sued and paying out settlements for their illegal DEI practices, it's all just a conspiracy!