> Why physical characteristics like gender or ethnicity should be important in the management selection?
To be clear, the below is not taking into account the allegations in the article, but just seeks to explain the thinking without judgement (as I'm frankly not sure which side I fall down on).
There's a school of thought that some degree of weighting helps to redress systemic issues by changing incentives, justified on the basis that there should be an equally capable pool of candidates in the underrepresented demographics.
The thinking then goes that e.g. if promotions at certain levels are biased, the argument for allowing that bias to continue is often that the pool to promote from leaves too few capable candidates of the underrepresented groups.
The problem with that, is that if (to take extreme numbers for simplicity) 100% of people being promoted from VP to SVP in a company are white men, then a lot of women and non-white people will either self-select out or not get promoted at lower level because it's a strong signal they're not valued and have no future there.
That in itself can make it a goal to diversify companies at higher levels irrespective of the current talent available for promotion at the level below.
As a concrete example, in 2006 Norway added a legal requirement for at least 40% of either gender at board level of a public limited company (ASA; usually listed companies as only ASA's can be listed, though they don't have to be) and in some other situations (e.g. companies with significant government ownership), and during the debates over this change, this was part of the arguments:
If there weren't enough qualified candidates, that was itself considered evidence of a systemic bias that making the change was hoped to help address. Both by giving women an incentive to stay on track towards board seats and give companies an incentive to address other biases to ensure there was a capable pool. Over time, it was also hoped that getting women onto boards would further strengthen the pressure from boards on companies to address the, as well as further develop a pool of women with growing board experience.
It was explicitly acknowledged by many proponents that there was a chance that it'd be hard to find suitable candidates initially, but that was seen as a sufficiently temporary problem to be addressed by companies through training and mentoring, not a justification for not changing the incentives.