Well I agree, ideally this should be automatic and inherent to a business, but when a company gets to a certain size you need people to be really thoughtful and consciously focused about this stuff, otherwise it can slip. So sometimes growth necessitates a dedicated person thinking about these issues.

More often, the person is just a token hire who functions more to ensure legal deniability on the company's part for anything that might pop up related to a diversity issue.

I hope more companies hire diversity officers for the sake of thinking hard about how to ensure that policies and company behaviors aren't harmful.

But for me it's a "I'll believe it when I see it" sort of thing. The default belief has to be that it's just a token position for the sake of legal deniability, just as most of HR has evolved into.

Yup. I've yet to see a diversity office having an actual budget and spending power.