The trouble is - once the company starts setting quotas and special rules for enforcing diversity, it attracts the type of people that focus on gaming those rules instead of bringing in added value and this quickly creates another form of toxicity.
In my opinion the ideal work environment is somewhere between those 2 extremes.
Can you tell me how you know this or what makes you think it is true? It sounds like a readily available stereotype.
A more recent example is how whiteboard programming questions during interviews turned out to be ineffective because it indicated how well a candidate rehearsed this type of questions, rather than their programming abilities.
- Reduces ability to catch errors. Linus: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow". But this does not work if everyone looks at things in the same way.
- Makes it easier for undesirable decision cascades to form: One or two people have an idea, and the other members in the group copy their decision, because they always agree. Smart well-weighted decisions are the product of disagreement.
- Stifles innovation. Do you really want your tech company to be all Stanford graduates? Where everyone knows the exact same algorithms, because they sat in the exact same classes, by the exact same professors for decades?
- Is inefficient in regards to Pareto optimality: It is impossible to hire someone that knows all. Hiring for diverse skill sets comes close. Hiring people with homogeneous skill sets is an expensive uphill battle, that relies on small random mutations.
- Reduces the motivation of your top performers. The really desirable job candidates don't always like working in a drone factory, where everybody dresses the same, there is no challenging of their ideas, and, for instance, women all have inferior roles.
This only covers one aspect of managing diversity though. Other than practising active diverse hiring though, some companies are very active in diverse communities which naturally leads to diverse hires.
I think it is absolutely an important thing to try to delve into, but yeah, maybe try to be strategic about it.
Am I the only person to call BS on this one? How this is likely going to be interpreted by an interviewer is "can I excuse my poorer skills/performance by capitalizing on my gender/race?", so you will get a politically correct answer like "diversity is among our core values and we promote it by giving preference to <...> among the candidates with equal skills and backgrounds" and will never hear from them again.
I mean, diversity is a legitimate value, but asking this during an interview when you are trying to advertise yourself as a valuable addition to the team, is a bit strange IMO.