[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.