Sadly, there is no proof that they do discriminate against white males, and there is also no proof that they do not. Everyone is immediately discrediting anything looking from a perspective that is against the current social trend. They might very well be awarding additional points to females and minorities when it comes to the interviews, even if they are less skilled than a white male equivalent, they may get the job just because they tick the box of a 'diverse' workforce.

I downvoted because your answer is full of all sorts of logical fallacies and falsehoods. To pick a couple: "Recall that in some research fileds such as biology, female might be already overrepresented." This is true at the undergraduate level, but by the time you reach tenure-track positions the trend is reversed.

"there are more female than male in Europe" - non-sequitor. This has no impact on discrimination, except that to be proportionally represented, we should expect to see not just equal numbers of males and females in a given role, but slightly more females.

@user2390246 regarding the representation in biology... is this a bad thing? I'm not at all supposing it is a good thing, I just think it's a thing. There are discriminators at work (things which cause differentiation) but to suppose those discriminators are the result of discrimination is another matter. Since academia has typically a more liberal/socialist view and racism and sexism seems to be exceptionally rare in higher education, if women have higher representation, then

@Quaternion What is your actual past/present experience with academia, which presumably leads you to say "racism and sexism seems to be exceptionally rare in higher education"?

it is hard to surmise the cause is discrimination, thus other discriminators are causal. If you chose to favor a particular sex in your hiring practice, it seems a bit misguided to do so on the grounds of discrimination. There is an irony that if other discriminators are at work (I mean causal factors leading to a visible difference when I say discriminators)

as you are now going to make it easier for the "under represented gender" to take up such roles to right this wrong in the name of "diversity".

Just personal experience in higher education, higher level work I'm not familiar with. Also I've worked as a recruiter for government placing numerous people with government post secondary and with the university it self, background is only Computer Science and Math at undergraduate level. But the view in working in that kind of industry is applicable to understanding the biases held by our clients, as we can see the result of hiring across the board while they only see themselves.

I've seen biases, the same people at companies are responsible for selecting the majority of new hires. There are most certainly personal biases and we note them, if you are payed based on providing candidates which are taken on and provide what that candidate does not want then you wont get paid, so biases are exploitable, although some are so apparent you would like to tell them so... but a lot of industries have few important clients... moral high ground or getting paid.

While this might be academia the issues here are common in HR and it is hardly unique to academia, although for various reasons it is more common in job postings originating from educational institutions.

@YemonChoi my statements are obviously from my personal experience and have to do with the hiring of contract roles. These people are hired for project work and my statement of exceptionally rare discrimination covers this. Also my personal view of the student body is that people from all groups and background were comfortable and well accepted.

But there is a difference between bias and discrimination. While to an outside observer there is little distinction when someone can look over your hiring practices for years, it is very clear that people who would assure you they would not discriminate very much do so. That is one of the leading problems from my point of view, no one thinks they have this problem.

Old school discrimination, along the lines of "I won't hire an X" is all but gone. What people are fighting against is bias, and it's insidious. It is very difficult to fight. Because of how important bias is, it is very valuable to understand. I wanted to conduct Myres-Briggs type testing on the clients and after it was explained everyone thought it was a great idea. Simply the test can be used as a measure of difference between personality types.

When talking and in an interview bias is huge, people don't communicate in pure logic, they relate the more different the background the less likely the relations they make in their oration will resonate. None of this has to do with skill, which why a number of studies has shown interviews to be very unreliable (with regards to written history and reference checks).

(Oh by "everyone thought it was a great idea" I meant at the recruitment firm, the clients would hardly think taking a test so we could exploit their bias would be a good thing... but given enough time you can get feel for their personality regardless.

@Quaternion Thanks for all the detail in the response!