[thereticent]

If you insist about the inherent superiority, you should define superiority. Obviously in the case of my colleague, she has achieved success in that career already. Surely that is the only "superiority" in the example, and that's benign.

The results are two-fold: most directly, more members of marginalized communities pursue and are successful in the field. More distally, clinical outcomes (patient return, treatment plan adherence, and medical outcomes) are higher when patients see doctors with a shared historically marginalized status, particularly race/ethnicity. That's borne out by the research. So increasing the diversity of the workforce enhances outcomes in diverse patient populations.

Your view is just overly jaded. There are data backing all of this up. It's not just done out of a feeling or a PR move or meaningless corporate metric (though those things indeed contribute to the motivation in a lot of cases).