Encouraging Quotas

Fortune senior writer Roger Parloff looks at the pressures that encourage companies to adopt hiring preferences/quotas. An excerpt:

Such statistical disparities are not illegal per se, according to the Supreme Court, nor do they create any duty on the employer's part to ensure the numbers improve. But as we'll see, in practice employers are under precisely such pressure.

As maybe they should be. Whether you think forcing employers to monitor and increase their diversity is good or bad probably depends on your intuition as to whether existing statistical disparities generally reveal discrimination or whether they instead reflect a complex stew of social, historical, and cultural legacies that no company can or should be expected to correct.