The Employment Equity Act provides a certain number of tools that managers can apply to the hiring process when they're trying to, as you say, effect positive change. There are some departments, and some parts of departments, that are struggling with representation, including of women. For example, one of the areas we're concerned about is women in technology. Through our post-secondary recruitment campaign this year, we gave preference to first consideration of candidates who self-declared as women when we were referring for new positions, because we know we have a significant shortage there: 25% of our computer scientists in the government are women. To try to bridge that gap, we can use the Employment Equity Act to bridge some of those measures.
Again, on the other hand, there are some organizations that probably could benefit from using name-blinding, because at the end of the day, when they look at their representation, there's clearly a problem; there's an issue. Even when we looked at some countries where name-blinding seemed to be positive in terms of its impact, these were countries where there was a significant amount of systemic discrimination against the group that was being targeted.
In terms of where it didn't work, as Stan was saying.... For example, in Australia, when they were looking at the impact on the hiring of women, there was the opposite effect. In fact, managers were actually predisposed to giving consideration to women in the screening decision, and anonymizing did actually have a detrimental impact on that.
These are all the factors that we have to look at, and I think case by case we have to determine whether using this technique is the right approach to address whatever circumstances may exist in a particular organization.