[annabellish]

>It is not a small or reasonable action to declare that judgements of suitability to work with an organization will be made based on sex, race, and other non-functional dimensions.

Correct, yet this is implicitly the case in every workplace. There are structural, systemic biases towards the majority population in every country. The reason why attempts to counter this are spreading "like a cancer" is because they show positive results quickly, in strict monetary terms, typically because the extra consideration given to minorities actually shows up very skilled people who were otherwise overlooked.

I appreciate that from the outside it can look very much like "reverse discrimination", and in essence it _is_, but it's a crude attempt to balance out the _existing_ discrimination which happens on a systemic, not personal, level. Nobody really thinks that there's serious problems with HR people all going "ew, no _black people_ here!" - the biases are extremely subtle and large scale, while the attempted solutions are hacky and small scale, because it's a lot easier to effect a small change than a large one.

[naasking]

> The reason why attempts to counter this are spreading "like a cancer" is because they show positive results quickly, in strict monetary terms

This is a pretty bold claim. Do you have a citation?

The only argument for this I've heard is that a culturally diverse workforce has marked differences in vacation time, holidays, etc. which lends larger organizations more operational flexibility. This doesn't benefit small organizations since they don't have sufficient operational slack to take advantage of it, and I've never seen this difference quantified. You seem convinced that this advantage is large and has been measured, so I'd like to see that data if you have it.