Author here. Yeah, I went back and forth on the intro a bunch and couldn't find a clearer way to not dismiss systemic issues while calling out the fact that we're not being fair to the people on the ground by bundling everything up as bias.
I don't think in general people are bundling everything up as bias; many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias.
A silly example: if your job description said "We only hire men" (and this weren't illegal), then even if your entire interview process were unbiased, you're probably going to end up with fewer men.
There is an argument that individually and as a whole, the tech community has been sending a message of "not for women" in various ways. If this is true, then the communities complaining about the pipeline problem could both be unbiased and a significant cause of the pipeline problem.
> many people are bundling up everything as sexism, but that is a superset of bias
I consider sexism to be a subset of bias, so this is an interesting take. I do not think your example shows something as unbiased, because I consider the statement "We only hire men" to be biased.
Looking it up, there are many usages of the word bias that support your definition, so I'll concede that point.
However, I think GP was using the term bias in the way I tend to think of it which is measurement bias; that is evaluating male and female candidates differently from each other, so I was pointing out a way in which the candidates that show up to interview can be biased in a way which is definitely the fault of the company.
