If all your firm wanted to do was ensure its employee pool matched the demographic of the qualified worker pool, it wouldn't have to do anything at all except test for competency. Matching demographics then happens naturally.

When your company says "the goal is to match the pipeline" yet still has an "aggressive diversity programme", what they mean is, "we know what we have to say to avoid legal trouble but we want to hire as many women as possible, and will find as many ways to bend the rules to do that as possible".

You still have to make sure you're doing that in an unbiased way. For example, if you ask interviewers to determine if a candidate is a good "cultural fit," you might accidentally end up with 95/5 men instead of 90/10.

Some kind of diversity program to make sure you're not undershooting the diversity of your job applicants is an absolute minimum requirement, I'd say.

Should you aim to overshoot? Maybe! That's a discussion worth having.

But unless that "aggressive programme" is illegally benefiting women with something concrete, like more pay, easier interviews or special privileges unavailable to men, it's like that the programme will be focused on trying to attract women into the profession who aren't already developers. So it'd make no difference to this hypothetical new college grad.

And if it did, then why would you want an employee whose primary reason for joining your startup over a competitor was the existence of a diversity programme? They'll just seem low energy compared to the men who joined because they love online discussions or whatever it is your firm does. Better pass and keep looking.

Statistically, you're correct. But there's a lot more of a subjective element to hiring than matching skills to requirements. One of the replies to your comment mentions "culture fit", for example.