Was totally inspired by Rrodrigo's courage in going first. I mean, I just sent an email to the entire company (or at least the ones who don't filter out the townhall mailing list) ...that's like 1800 people and includes people whose books I've bought and read. It's exciting.
I was replying to a thread about diversity in hiring, i.e. quotas vs. goals, with a side of how to get the pool of interviewees to be more diverse.
On a related note to diversity recruiting, I also am currently at TWU (dev, Chicago office) and I am interested in the small and diminishing presence of women in IT and what can be done to redirect the trends towards a ratio which more closely resembles parity.
My favorite document on the topic is a (longish) howto by Val Henson about how to avoid driving female Linux users out of groups, and how to find more and retain them. I believe that his points are very generalizable to the IT industry as a whole. http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-HOWTO/
When it comes to interviewee's backgrounds in computer science, I too am one of those who came to the field from an unexpected direction. I was in the Humanities department during my undergraduate career, and programming didn't gain me anything in my particular academic or social circles. I think that, as a solution, "lowering the bar" is worse than the problem because it gives fuel to the cultural theory that women in IT are not as skilled as their male counterparts.
I believe that mentoring of female students by women in the IT industry gives good result percentage per time invested on the part of the mentor. Mentoring needs to start with students before they enter college, where they have already begun to choose their specialties. In fact, I think that late middle school (7th and 8th grades) may be the ideal start time for introducing the specific field and attributes of our field to students.