How my company is lowering the bar to increase diversity

It sounds like you've had a bit too much to think. Calm down, take some Soma.

> My company brought in an diversity activist to speak about improving diversity at our company. She told us that it is sexist to prefer to hire people with a college degree because more men than women graduate with degrees in CS. Instead we are told to assume that all people are equally qualified regardless of their education.

This does not pass the smell test. Sure, a certain type of "diversity activist" might say something like that, but for a company of any sort of quality to just accept it and implement it, that's unrealistic.

More realistically, what they may have implemented is something like accepting that people without CS degrees from top universities may still be perfectly capable software developers, which is true (being one, I'd like to think so, at least), but if that's the case, the article is grossly misrepresenting it.

Some companies will rate applicants in a series of categories. Education and experience are the usual. Lately, "fit" has become extremely important to HR departments. It usually means people with the same culture, race, age, music and sports tastes, etc.

If your company thinks it has a diversity problem, it's probably related to "fit". My suggestion is to continue to filter people out based on education and experience equally and give a boost in the "fit" category to categories of people that are minorities in your company. I think that's perfectly fair to offset internal biases.

EDIT: I get it some people are arguing that, by filtering on education/experience, there won't be any minorities left to be "boosted" in the "fit" category. If it is THAT bad, the company can try to expand who it's reaching out to but I understand that's a bigger problem (e.g. company in SV cannot afford relocation costs and thus has to look for local candidates only will not help with the diversity issue).

Just stop been an asshole, asshole.

I'm not sure who diversity trainers are but some of their suggestions are just ridiculous and un-inventive. They are bad enough that they might be purposefully sabotaging the process. No one would implement these suggestion, it's simply bad business. What is needed are un-biased assessments and non of these assessments are unbiased. They seem to try to correct the bias meter the most quick fix manner possible. People without skills with only spoil the diversity pool because they will poorly represent. I say this as an African person as well. I would not want this for myself. It's insulting.