The company doesn't "want" anything. It's a big social machine that is not so much designed as evolved, and only the very core of the company experiences selection pressure.
At the center of every company is a system that prints money. This bit is almost all that really matters, and is the part that experiences selection pressure.
Threaten it, screw with it, or break it and you will be out of a job, because you either killed the company or got thrown out by people who were afraid you would (or, sometimes, who are just greedy and were worried you'd hurt the amount of money they make through the company).
Everything outside of that central system is secondary, and doesn't really impact the company's survival a hoot.
People at the company may love their secondary systems, really believe they matter, and pour sincere effort and careers into them, but when secondary systems come into conflict with primary systems, they Lose. Every. Time.
In the very long term, nothing else can happen, at least in for-profit companies. Competition will destroy kinder companies by being ruthless to secondary systems that the kinder ones keep. This is what Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex calls the "Malthusian race to the bottom". Amazon and Wal-Mart are locked in a violent struggle of this nature right now.
I think most people are not entirely aware of these dynamics, as my premise that companies are mostly evolved not designed suggests.
So, in all likelihood, there are very sincere people who really want to see the company change for the better recruiting activists and noble researchers.
Everyone likes to feel that they're being goodness, so they all applaud the secondary "goodness optimization" systems.
After enough time, though, those activists come into conflict with a primary system, and discover to their shock that they don't have the leverage to change it at all. This is particularly astonishing to them because they've fought to change a lot of secondary systems and had many successes there.
They (rightly, from their frame of reference) refuse to budge, get fired or leave, wash their hands of the place, then start at the next place in one of its secondary systems.
Rinse and repeat.
It's hard being human.
If Timnit Gebru were a cynical opportunist, she would just hop on the bandwagon, pretend to care and collect her paycheck. But she seems to be a true believer, and true believers won't accept ineffectual groveling. They want to see the real thing. Ergo, collision.
I agree with this statement but for the life of me I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer as to why companies don’t want to actually change things. Is it purely institutional inertia? Are the benefits of a more diverse workplace not accepted by the powers that be, so efforts to achieve that are undermined?