If you want diverse engineering teams but you have a serious pipeline problem where few minority and female engineers apply, what can you do? One answer is to encourage more referrals for those candidates by paying a higher referral bonus. It doesn’t seem like “blatant discrimination” to me, any more than having a recruiting fair at a historically black college would be.

Also, as a side note, what company is this? And how are bonuses 5x as high for women but also “especially” for minority women. Which is it?