[waterhouse]

> Affirmative action doesn't require a lower bar.

The one strategy I've heard of that doesn't do this, and isn't something any rational organization who saw no intrinsic benefit to "diversity" would already be doing, is "spending extra recruitment resources to yield good candidates of the underrepresented groups". For example, you could send 5 recruiters to all-female colleges or majority-black colleges that aren't highly ranked in CS, in the hopes of turning up as many good programmer candidates as you'd get from sending 1 recruiter to a highly-ranked CS college. That indeed does not require a lower bar—although it spends resources in a way I'd consider wasteful.

But I don't think that's what affirmative action normally means, and I'm generally leery of allowing proponents to redefine the term more broadly (that type of thing enables motte-and-bailey argumentation).

Did you have another strategy in mind?