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I agree with her, diversity is more than just race, sex, sexual preference, etc. However I would say that I think these things as a top level attribute DO correlate with different lived experiences that you want in a diverse workforce.

Companies are not going to ask you about your political leanings, they are probably not going to give you some mental test to see how you react to situation A and situation B. If you look at the stats, race and gender do correlate between stark differences in people. For instance, the "wealth gap" between black and white Americans is about 10x, growing in poverty vs. growing up in a stable middle class family causes a different lived experience, you view the world differently because of how you grew up. That's not to say that all black people are poor and all white people are rich, but if you're working with a limited data set and are thinking about how you can get some people in a room with different lived experiences, you could do a lot worse than saying "let's get a mix of different races in here". I think the same thing applies to women and other traits that companies and institutions use for their diversity metrics.