While I do think GP is correct at many places, my team literally hired a black woman from Georgia and turned down a white dude from Boston, lol. I am not a fan of the overbearing top down policies like Microsoft is talking about, but I have become friendly with aforementioned hire, and some of the stories of discrimination and just people being really rude to her in the professional world are mind blowing to me. I can definitely believe that a lot of workplaces do actively discriminate against various minority groups.
A single datapoint doesn't confirm or refute the presence of bias; your anecode doesn't contrast anything I've written in my comment about the definition of bias. If the organization consistently chose a black woman over an equally qualified white man, that would likely indicate bias.
What is "literally hired"; does your organization figuratively hire most of the time, except for the surprising odd time when it is, wow, literal?
I feel you may have misunderstood my comment. I wasn't really trying to argue anything, merely stating my belief in light of information conveyed to me by someone. Let me explain.
I don't think I intended to counter anything with what I was saying. I was merely amused by the intersection of the article i was reading with the situation I had - being involved in the hiring of, specifically, an african american woman in Georgia to an engineering role and the turning down of a white dude from Boston. "Literally" was used to emphasize the exactness of the hypothetical to my reality - less analogous than equal.
With that out of the way, the core of my comment was intended to convey the message "I can believe that there is a lot of hidden bias out there in the world, based on the stories someone generally considered to be at risk of many biases has told me."
