Quotas are exactly what you need. But not <i>hiring</i> quotas.<p>Feel free to adjust the percentages below, but this is what you should aim for to eventually get to gender diversity (for example):<p>Tell recruiters you want 50% of the qualified candidates they send to you to be female.<p>Evaluate resumes in a form stripped of as much identifying information as possible.<p>Half of all candidates interviewed should be female. If not, try to identify an additional upstream bias, perhaps at the resume evaluation stage (example: Women have less free time for side projects, so make sure that when you evaluate a Github account it is for quality not quantity).<p>Aim for diversity in your interviewers. Half of the interviewing employees should be female. If that isn't possible, at least one of the interviewing employees <i>must</i> be female (and if you only have one interviewing female employee, she should get a 'creep factor' veto, <i>especially</i> if anyone else in the company (like a founder) has a veto. If that isn't possible (because you have no female employees), <i>fix it and hire a woman already</i>.<p>That's it. No need for actual hiring quotas after that point, you should be able to hire for merit out of the interviewees. If you end up not being gender diverse (ie. only industry average or below), <i>figure out why</i> (perhaps an existing interviewing employee is setting of <i>their</i> 'creep factor' alarms so they don't accept your offer, or there is a promotion bias and talented women aren't sticking around after you hire them).<p>In parallel, you can make similar efforts around race, etc.