Since there seems to be some activity around this comment and I can no longer edit the parent comment, let me add a few more thoughts here.
Diverse hiring (as in equal outcome hiring) does not materially benefit companies.
I was on, or closely worked with teams that built early versions of modern virtual memory, Excel, Turbo Pascal, WebTV, and IIS, and they were largely white men, with a sprinkling of Asian men. Would these products be better engineering marvels with more racial and gender representation? Possibly, but not because of the existence of “women algorithms” or “black design patterns”. Human brains work similarly given similar inputs. There is some revenue to be regained in designing for edge case blind spots, but it is an overwhelming small fraction when you are working at the bleeding edge of an industry. You did not see these initiatives in tech at the time for the same reason you don’t see them in the space travel industry, or anti-aging research, or on the teams working on a COVID-19 vaccine (how ridiculous would that sound?). The industry was not mature enough, as it is now, for such overhead (distractions, to be less polite). There was important work to be done, and we didn’t care who you were as long as you could help. These were some of the most open, progressive, intelligent and honest teams I got to work with.
Then why is it important? Because diverse hiring (as in equal-opportunity hiring) is __the right thing to do__. Talent can come from South America or South Chicago just as easily as Bangalore or Austin, TX. The next Donald Knuth or Jeffrey Dean should not be denied an opportunity because of their skin color or gender if they shone through. And in those teams, several of them shone through and we scrambled to bring them aboard.
What is happening now is analogous to dredging the river bed, incurring the costs of that (which is possible because the industry is massively profitable and mature, with very little paradigm-shifting work left at these companies) to find what might be remotely shiny. We can then report our “progress” and pat ourselves on the back. Except, this breeds resentment from the rocks and diamonds not getting dredged, the aforementioned Peter Principle issue, and as I’ve observed, the general unease. You will not find a team at a company like Etsy that is as accepting and open as the teams I mentioned, because the sacred thing that pulls together smart people - the “bar” for lack of better term - may have been compromised in bringing in the latest new hire. If there is a shadow of doubt about that, even if this person truly is a diamond, they are done a disservice because of this dynamic at play. It is unfair, and in the long term, actually hurts these UR communities in this industry.