I like this line of thinking because it reveals the absurdity of the current demographics. Given that the US professional landscape is radically skewed away from women and people of color in terms of headcount, salary and access to capital, how do you justify this?
Is it genuinely your belief that there is an predisposition towards success in this field for white straight men, who compose its overwhelming majority?
Were we to NOT do this and actually grade people on their capacity and potential in education, job selection and social standing then I suspect we'd see a much less deviated distribution.
But we don't. We see something that more closely resembles the hypothesis that people are doing exactly what you're describing, to the benefit of white folks.
People transform criticisms of diversity statistics into a criticism of competency standards on hiring and promotion, which is exactly no one wants.
When we boil people down to their demographic membership, we do exactly that. We decide that a latino son of a doctor from Cleveland has more in common with an Nicaraguan in on an H1B than with a Caucasian son of a doctor from Cleveland.
> You cannot rationally suggest both that diversity is important but that people's traits and backgrounds aren't.
First, in specific cases, you can argue that it doesn't matter. A core dump is a core dump.
Second, you can argue that boiling people down to a handful of traits and background is saying the rest of the considerations are mostly unimportant.
What if you have a candidate whose parents were Amish? That's an incredibly unique candidate, so he should be off the diversity charts, right? But the current model we apply to determine diversity lumps him in with all the white boys who go to tech magnet schools in the Bay Area.