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Equal Opportunities

I work for an outsourcing company. We take engineers in poor countries and pair them up with tech fixit companies in rich countries. We take a little money from them, and each party still ends up a little better than they would if they were on their own.

We started hiring in South Africa, and it escaped nobody's notice that we mostly hire white people, despite them being a minority within the country. We also hire about 95% men.

The reason for hiring mostly men seems plain: women tend not to apply.

We hire mostly white people because they're the best at the job, which then begs the question 'why?'.

Language gives us the biggest reason. We need to hire people with excellent English, and white South Africans tend to speak better English. This probably has a lot to do with the fact that English and South Afrikaans have so much in common that Afrikaans speakers have an advantage when learning English.

Any equal or proportional hiring policy would end up skewing our results substantially.

We have a self-perpetuating problem - more of one group in IT leads to more of the same. Left to their own devices, the population may well reach a natural equilibrium, but it could take centuries.

The only way out I can see is educational program which grab young people and give them some extra foothold. Extra schooling, IT classes for women, free laptops for poor towns, et c.