Can you please explain this whole American "affirmative action" and "special hiring practices" thing? As I understand it, when given two candidates with equal interview results, the company will choose the female instead of the male one. Am I getting it wrong?
The generic explanation is: The 'minority' can often have worse interview results and still get the job over a non-minority.
There was recently in the news a lawsuit against Harvard I believe, because there is some evidence that a White or Asian (minority in US but not in schools as a lot of them attend school) student can have better admissions testing scores and a "underrepresented" minority with lower scores gets admitted instead.
Wikipedia: In other countries, such as the UK,[7][8][9] affirmative action is rendered illegal because it does not treat all races equally.
The Harvard lawsuit you're referring to was quite a bit more subtle than that. There was a consistent pattern of Asian applicants getting lower scores in interviews conducted by Harvard admissions officers than in the other interviews that were part of the application process while other applicants of other races got approximately the same scores from admissions officers as from other interviewers. This was taken as evidence that the admissions officers' interview scores (and thus the overall admissions decisions) were biased against Asian applicants.
That is correct...in some cases they'll even choose the woman/Black/Hispanic over a more qualified Asian or White candidate to boost their diversity numbers.
