Theres a number of “debates” I got sucked into in the industry over this. DEI initiatives start from two particular principles. First, studies that show having more diverse voices “in the room” when working on a project improves the project and avoids some ugly blunders (see Google Photos labeling black people as gorillas). So there’s clear benefits to the business if you don’t just hire a bunch of white tech bros. The second principle is that biases (conscious or not) impact the whole pipeline. If you are a teacher who thinks “women don’t like STEM”, then your attitude will tend to cause women to leave/avoid your classes, making a it a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you are boss that “has a type” when hiring, your team will be almost entirely one type of person, and you’ll think that your “type” is the “right type”. It’s the impact of many seemingly small things that can cause us to lose out on talent.
The end result is that organizations taking on these initiatives do include some putting thumbs on the scale. Reaching out to offer internships to women and minorities, and yes, using “are they under-represented in our team” as tie breaks when you have multiple candidates you want to hire for a single position.
But everyone in tech that I’ve seen argue against it say that it’s undermining the “meritocracy”, because it elevates unqualified people to “meet quotas”. It’s an easy story to tell, but doesn’t really match reality, as if everyone was using quotas, nobody could reach them due to all the small issues in the education pipeline.
The mind numbing thing is that programming back in the day was considered women’s work. Secretarial work to be performed by data processors. So it should be no surprise that it was the people doing this work (such as Grace Hopper) that suggested some of the key developments that underpin the modern computer. Once it was figured out just how transformative computers would be, men rushed in and it stopped being “secretarial work”. So it went from “too unimportant for men” to “too important for women”. Video games were the same way. Early attempts were to go after men and women pretty evenly. The idea being that men and women could socialize over games and drinks (shocking). It wasn’t until Nintendo decided to sell the NES in toy aisles, and had to decide which aisle to put it in that these consoles became a “boy’s toy” in the US, which forms the current anti-woman stance in that industry.
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On the political aspect, I don’t believe it’s a distraction any more than the rest of his jobs policies are. It’s all from the same vein of thought: protecting (white male) domestic jobs.
