In deep corporate America, there are plenty of people who have virtually no responsibilities beyond a few basic configuration tasks. They are still unable to perform many of these tasks without significant help from coworkers. And we cover for them.
Every incompetent coworker I can think of was a man. I do not think this is confirmation bias, I think it's basic statistics, because most of the engineers those employers hired were men.
I don't know about corporate America in particular, but corporate anything is a big pile of useless dipped in incompetent, where all the work is done by contractors who are also useless and incompetent. Because there is noone in the damn org that knows how to hire a competent techie in the first place.
So for me the OP's experience is more simply explained by working for an organisation that doesn't know how to hire engineers, not anything to do with diversity drives.
I don't present my situation as anything more than anecdotal, it's just what I've noticed. And to answer your question no the manager does not treat male developers the same way, they're held to a higher standard. In fact the "middle-aged white male" has to be above average at this particular company to be kept on.
I'd wager a third of the nodejs "developer community" could be described that way. The key thing is was she hired to write sql queries?
I tend to reserve judgement until their effort can be judged. If he or she is slow but learning and improving, I'd accept (and probably raise with a manager) that the hiring process is flawed and try to help him/her.
If its just utter idiocy, I'm less forgiving.
I literally had a business analyst come to me - the new guy at the time - on her last day after several years of working in the org and ask me what her email address is.
Or the BA who insisted she didnt need to write a clear and specific spec for a feature, because she could just open up dreamweaver and put some buttons on a page.
Those sorts of people I have zero fucking time for, and will drink merrily when they quit/are fired.
And then they're your boss. Or your boss's mate.
Except, make 'technical management' decisions like "we should use mongodb because it's web-scale".
I think this is untrue. I know a lot of male "sofware engineers" who are totally incompetent and remain well employed.
One could speak of someone having more skill than another, but if both skillsets have no value, it doesn't really matter.
Oh yes. Especially if you work in, say, a big financial corporation- the kind of large, monolithic organisation that isn't a technology company, per se, but uses technology (as only a large monolith would). In that kind of place, you can expect the majority of "technical" employees to be largely uninterested in, and therefore fairly clueless about, technology (i.e. they're just in it to jump over to tech management roles down the line). So, software engineers who can't write SQL queries are a thing. A common, inescepable fact of life, indeed.
I would not like to say whether I'm speaking of personal experience with such organisations. It wouldn't be proper.
Of course taking this into account cannot completely eliminate selection bias, and the sample size either way is probably too small to be all that meaningful. It sounds like the attitude of her manager towards the incompetent developer is actually the most significant point here: this incompetent developer is being retained and in fact praised by her manager for diversity despite the obvious issues. Does the manager treat incompetent male developers the same way? The implication of the post is clearly "no", but again selection bias is possible.