[fatnoah]

I get the point the author is making, but I'm not 100% sure I agree with how she expressed it. By limiting the definition of diversity/minority, we can probably identify a cohort for any individual where they are in the majority.

Diversity measured across an entire company or large cohort doesn't really show the value of diversity in the first place. For me, the real power of diversity is at a micro-level. The author would absolutely add diversity to a three person team where one member is an Indian woman born, raised, and educated to PhD in India, another is a Croatian man with no formal education beyond secondary school, and the third person was a poor kid from Detroit that scrapped their way through community college and into the job market.

When I'm putting a team together, I try my hardest to create diversity. That doesn't mean running through a checklist of gender, ethnicity, sexual identification, etc. but it does mean looking for people with different points of view, experience, and ways of solving problems.

tl;dr: Diversity == good, agree gender doesn't necessarily mean diversity, diversity is a meaningless term without context.

[Kalium]

I think checklists get favored because they're easy to codify in the form of procedures and business processes. They're also easy to measure and report on.

The broader, more complex concerns you point to are difficult to measure and thus perhaps more likely to be given short shrift.

[fatnoah]

All excellent points. It's definitely not press-release material, but (IMHO) highlights how things should be. Companies would naturally reach the desired levels of "diversity" if they simply practiced it at a micro level. Certainly some teams would look "unbalanced" by some of the traditional metrics, but I think everything would even out on the larger scale.

An interesting anecdote was that I led Engineering for a startup that was acquired by a large ($50-100 Billion) company. After we were acquired, several people commented on my collective team as being the "most diverse" in the company. That was nice to hear, but (for me) the most gratifying part was the team members taking stock and collectively thinking "oh yeah, I guess we are diverse!" It happened on purpose, but with the intention of using diversity as a source of strength not as a means of checking off a box.

[Kalium]

Thinking about this further, something else comes to mind.

One of the other things worth considering is that failing to comply with checklist-driven diversity can land you in court for supposed discrimination, where the traditional metrics matter quite a bit and other approaches matter not at all. Between liability and ease of implementation and measurement, it's definitely going to be privileged over other approaches.