Das Uber,
Do you understand that:
“If that cannot be achieved in the event nobody from a specific gender applied OR MET CRITICAL TECHNICAL OR SAFETY QUALIFICATIONS, an explanation must be provided.”
I do. Explain to me how in the example I provided, this criteria isn't satisfied?
Selecting those for interview is about competition with their peers. Its quite possible that all 100 applicants passed minimum technical and safety qualifications. We just selected the top 50 most competitive. Yet to satisfy this stupid requirement, we discarded more competitive men for less competitive women.
If you're suggesting that an airline would never do that, and that they will only ever select the 50 most competitive people regardless of gender, then why have this pointless program or objective in the first place? The only way it could ever be achieved is if they had an equal number of applicants! Considering by your own information, only 5% of applicants are female, its an impossible goal and one bound for failure.
Considering also statements such as; "Incentives and quotas have helped reverse this situation", where its openly acknowledged that quotas are good, it seems clear to me that the intent is to take action to artificially increase the number of women to be interviewed and short listed.
You appear to be attempting to whitewash this program by putting forward a scenario where HR picks the 50 most competitive people and when inevitably 50% aren't women, are happy to just write an email to management "missed out again! maybe next time!" with that being the end of it. To suggest thats the real goal of the program I believe is to be intentionally disingenuous.
Badly written by myself. 95% of airline jobs in a world where half the people are women. Here in the US its actually 5.4%, probably higher than in Australia.
Ok, but so what? 97.7% of primary and kindergarten teachers are women. 92% of registered nurses. The list goes on.
That a field is heavily dominated by one sex isn't reason to start up a program of discrimination. Action should be taken to ensure that every field is AVAILABLE to anyone who wants to pursue it. But this is an issue of culture and doesn't have a lot to do with the actions of an airline. Seeking to correct discrimination with, drumroll, more discrimination is absurd.
If I were a minority (sex, ethnic or other), I would want to see an airline engaging in a meritocracy. That would give me the motivation and belief to make myself as good as I can be, and win the job on merit. What I wouldn't want to see was an airline engaging in discrimination that this week at least, was in my favor.