You have to be very, very careful with laswuits like these, these kind of statistics fall into the old correlation and causality. Looking at the number of applicants for the job, the raw numbers, is idiotic, because these days applying for a job is akin to spam to be honest, because of job boards and reposting, when we advertise a job were get flooded with resumes and we spend a lot of time going through them, and the yield of ‘real’ candidates is small. We ask for someone with X years of experience, and we get a ton of people with 4x, we get people with no experience, we get people applying for a software QA position when their experience is in the pharm industry with product QA…plus you get things like you are looking for green card or citizen, and you get a flood of people needing h1 visa transfer, or worse, we get people applying from places like India and Bangladesh when the ad clearly states where the job is located…
So how many of those 1186 Asian applicants were weeded out before even being considered? And if you look at the pool of people who actually interviewed, how many of them were Asian? If a significant pool of those interviewed were Asian, then that 1186 figure might be bs, if it is raw numbers.
The other thing might be the jobs they are applying for and what the skill set is. One of the problems with Asian employees might be many of them are foreign born and might not have great language skills, which for some jobs may be important (and again, I am not explaining Palantir or what they did or didn’t do), it is often a big barrier when we are hiring for tech positions, where so many of the applicants are foreign born, communications skills are critical and sometimes we have to pass on a talented person because they have a hard time communicating, in other jobs they might be the top candidate. Likewise, if the positions are managerial a different skill set is required then if let’s say this was a coding job.
Keep in mind that the government has the burden of proof here, they have to show, for example, that the X white candidates who were hired were measurably less suitable for the job than Asian candidates who didn’t make the grade, and one of the hardest things in the world is determining who really is the better candidate for the job. A lot of the times discrimination cases are proven by a test, they send in resumes to the company with basically the same background, where some have names ‘obviously’ Asian and others that sound more “American” and they see who gets called back.
Put it this way, what the government might consider equally experienced may not be. Without getting off into a discussion about the merits or non merits of the program, the H1B program, that was supposed to be about getting skills not generally available in the US, now has attached to it “appropriate degree or background”, and in tech I can tell you that doesn’t mean much, many of the H1B candidates I have interviewed could be considered ordinary at best, the schools they went to are basically two year tech school and their work experience was routine…so they could very well say "well, if the candidate was Asian, had a degree, had some experience coding in X, knowledge of Y, the fact they didn’t get hired must mean its discrimination.
As to the merits of this case, that will come out in a court, and the burden is on the government and simple statistics doesn’t prove anything, it is going to come down to who was interviewed and who was hired and how they stand up under scrutiny and it is not an easy thing to prove, because there is no science to hiring, in an entry level position the kid with the 4.0 in Comp sci may not be a good match whereas the kid with a B might be.