[gboudrias]

I'm not saying it benefits the public necessarily, I'm saying it benefits those who opt for diversity. I don't expect STEM to have as big an impact on women's liberation as, say, business or politics. I don't think two cultures can be compared on this basis, my assumption is that, within one culture, diversified organizations will win out on average.

[tomp]

But diversity is only valuable to the extent that it helps create a better society. Like, ideally noone would even have to work! And there are plenty of examples of segregated (i.e. non-diverse) situations that we support becaues we deem them socially beneficial (e.g. sex-specific gyms and toilets, tall people competing in basketball, smart people are scientists, ...) (to be precise, personally I don't support these, but our society seems to, which would imply that the people on average do).

[topmonk]

I think it depends in the task, and what the interest of the various groups are. If you have 10 engineers but only 2 of them are really passionate about it, and the other 8 would rather be doing something else, but due to incentives based on their minority status, they decided it was worth the extra money, you'd probably do a lot worse than a company which had 10 engineers that were all hired based on merit.