And of course you find it outrageous that in the entirety of Asia, Africa and Middle East, white people constitute nonexistent percentage of the population, and there are virtually no white men in the positions of power there.
Right?
Do those jobs pay tens of millions in yearly comp and do those men get to decide the faith of hundreds of thousands of their fellow employees? In other words, are those jobs as "powerful" as the jobs held by the people we're talking about? I guess they're not. This is what the whole discussion is about.
And to get back to your question the answer is yes, one of my aunts used to be a industrial-crane operator, my mother used to be a construction works inspector or whatever the official name is in English, which meant that she got to be on construction sites pretty much her whole career, but that happened because I grew up in the non-meritocratic Eastern Europe where the regime in place knew that leaving aside half of the population (in this case women) just because society saw those jobs as "not for women" was plain stupid.
Incidentally that point was first made (afaik) by John Stuart Mill, interesting to see that his ideas were implemented by nominally communist regimes while beacons of capitalism like Amazon hide behind terms like "meritocracy" that happen to put forward the interests of only part of the people involved.
I personally think that a society that encourages the first two tends to work out better than some of the others, but still probably unrealistic.
It's easy to dissect on one company and criticize them for their lack of diversity, but amazon is only a little over 20 years old despite its immense success and most of its S-Team has stuck around since its inception.
I'm reminded of a quote from 30 Rock about corporate structure, "When a big one falls, four little ones rise up". Its just the case that the 'big ones' have rarely fallen in the S-team. For positions like these, in the apex of the business world, only time will tell.
*Sorry I'm not native english speaking, and I'm using the word dignity in the same sense we - in italy - use the word "dignità", but I'm not sure those two words has exactly the same meaning.
I personally believe that all men and women are created equal, no matter their skin color, and when a society is "built" in such a way that only white men get to put their hands on the positions that "matter" then it means that no way in hell that society is meritocratic. Believing otherwise is believing that there are intrinsic differences between men and women, and more generally speaking between people of different skin colors. We both know that is not the case. Which leaves us with why do only white men get to "profit" from the current status-quo?