[ViktorRay]

“Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white.”

This part of the article bothered me. Why was diverse placed in quotation marks? Aren’t South Asians and East Asians considered minorities?

Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East Asians. Many different languages and cultures….

So why was diverse in quotation marks? Why did the author say “sort of”???

[majormajor]

Why did you drop the second sentence on that topic?

"Employee demographics are “diverse,” sort of—I would guess, based on a visual survey of the cafeteria at lunchtime, that about a third of the staff is South Asian, a third is East Asian, and a third is white. The workers are overwhelmingly male."

"Overwhelmingly male" is an obvious counterpoint the author is making to the ethnicity distribution and by itself explains the quotation marks.

Everyone is free to read in additional subtext but your question can be answered solely by not dropping the second sentence of the author's.

[0xcafefood]

"Also South Asians are a very diverse group in it itself. As are East Asians. Many different languages and cultures…."

Europeans and their diaspora (aka White people) are also very diverse in the sense of many languages, many cultures, many phenotypes, varied histories, etc.

But we all know what capital-D "Diversity" means here, and it is not this.

[nsoonhui]

What really pains me is the topic of diversity must somehow crop up, even though we are discussing on things that have absolutely no relevance to it at all.

What does whether someone is a White or Asian got to do with his competency on the job?

[esafak]

I think the writer is insinuating that ethnicity is only one type of diversity. What if 95% of those Asian employees were male, for instance?

[fourier456]

Rhetorical question, what do you think?