I'm working at a company where DEI mandates tried making the workforce 50/50 male to female workers ratio. The field is tech.

Before DEI mandates for each 10 to 20 men applying for a position, 1 or 2 women applied for it. There was a significant amount of lower women and HR deemed that an issue, so they changed the process to show tech leads 3 promising men candidates and 3 promising women candidates, no issues for now, one year into this process and we started evaluating our workers skills, as we always do, the results were insane:

  • Women created 300% more bugs
  • Women worked 30% less efficiently and 20% slower
  • The 3 least efficient squads were 50% female
  • Workforce (at least in the tech side) was 35% women, but only 10% of the tickets working towards goals were done by women

This created a full blown panic in the office and we were looking for suggestions on how to fix this, the most reasonable solution was presented: "Let's stop dividing candidates by gender and go back to segregating them by quality", the current HR lead strongly opposed that view and said that they needed to fill quotas for equality.

This unwillingness to budge lead to even worse results, tech leads avoided even looking at the 3 female candidates due to concerns about their possible underperformance, leading to a whole quarter filled with 0 female hires in tech and sales. HR addressed this "blatantly sexist" issue and demanded that we needed to hire more women and that action would be taken to "sexist" tech leads that were unwilling to hire more women.

In less than a month we lost 8 out of 20 squad leads to resignations and at least 20 more highly qualified developers too, the CTO and CEO finally stepped in and had a lot of meetings with HR to restructure the hiring model, which ended with the HR lead being fired/resigning (not sure which one), and reverting to the old model of quality instead of equality candidate looking.

We might be looking at significant workforce reduction due to terrible HR decisions and the CEO and new HR lead are looking for advice on it.

My questions are:

  • Is it possible to hire equal amount of women and men in a male dominated field without compromising quality, and if so, how?
  • How do you mend the trust in men after showing them the company was willing to fire them on a gender basis if they won't follow mandates?
  • How do you mend trust in women after they saw men ignoring their resumes due to performance concerns?
  • What's your opinion on DEI mandates and how should we handle them?
  • How do you handle the huge rift DEI mandates cause to gender relations in the company where there were previously none?

I've been ruminating on this issues a lot and hopefully I can get some opinions on this.