Think about it like the movie Moneyball. By rejecting the flawed collective wisdom of baseball insiders, they were able to create a winning team on a budget by using overlooked metrics. Likewise, job interviews are notoriously unreliable and inconsistent at finding good employees. The uneven demographics in tech jobs is likely partly the result of flawed wisdom in the hiring process. If you sample more heavily from an irrationally underrepresented group, you would get on average higher value candidates than if you sampled evenly from the whole pool.
Selecting solely based on merit is only effective if your selection process works properly. In practice, we see that both conscious and unconscious biases pervade the selection process, so I think this method is worthwhile.
(Full disclosure: I'm only in one of the groups I mentioned above.)
Or to lower wages by increasing the talent pool.
From a supply side (employee/contractor) it would be fantastically negative: "These jerks are lowering my rockstar wages by hiring women, ethnic minorities and old people." Lose-lose.
There's a lot in what you expect to see here. I wonder how much this type of thing makes these discussions worse than they have to be?
For women and ethnic minorities, the opposite is true: the more you promote them, as a simple employed worker, the more you're effectively lowering your own wage in real terms. You are effectively self-taxing out of solidarity, while your employer reaps the rewards in terms of additional productivity and profit.
This is one of the problems of modern life for which progressives (including me) really have no answer beyond a generic "all will get well eventually" feelgood optimism. One quick look at statistics for male remuneration and wages in real term post-feminism doesn't really support that optimism.
is it really though? it seems like you are assuming it is but I'm not convinced that it actually is.
furthermore, in an era where millions of dollars are thrown around by VC's and founders at startups (that provide no real value to customers in many cases) at wildly overinflated valuations, it seems that people have forgotten the key purpose of running a business. TO MAKE MONEY. The goal isn't to make sure everyone is represented or to make everyone feel good. No one cares. This article is complete spin. The real goal of this company is to get engineers at a discounted price under the guise of, "oh you've been overlooked by these other companies, we're super female friendly, we're soooo diverse. we can't pay you as much, but we're just one big family here so it's worth it."
IN GENERAL: diversity of thought is good. diversity of skin color, ethnicity, gender, etc just to tick a box saying 'yup, we support diversity!' is nonsensical. there seems to be a large disconnect in logical thinking when these two things are advertised as the same thing. hire the best candidates, regardless of the meaningless BS (like gender or race). ok, you think the hiring process skews against some candidates (I don't know if this is really true or not), then change the interview process to support that. saying that female candidates don't do well with whiteboarding exercises, so you're changing the process to something they are better at is so silly (and quite frankly insulting to those women who ARE prepared for the whiteboarding exercises). you're optimizing for female employees, not for building your business and providing value.