And FYI it's not a paradox that you can 'care about diversity' and still be bullied by activists.
Major corporations are making requirements for panels at conferences etc. and it can get very complicated.
A female documentarian in Montreal just quit the industry over the institutional rejection of her work which focused on homelessness and happened to be mostly 'white men' due to requirements of diversity.
In my own discussions with 'executive level people' I find that they are generally of the classically liberal type (think European liberal). Basically - they are nice, upper middle class white men who actually do 'care' about such things, but generally are not exactly well read or super thoughtful on the issue. They're not 'up on the lingo' and are very, very afraid of saying or doing the wrong thing. The 'right thing' is effectively forced upon them, and they generally act to placate angry voices and want it to all go away, like a Father caving to his teenagers angry demands about this that, hoping that tomorrow it will all just go away.
I've heard, even my own very white, executive golf club member say the most 'woke' things lately it's almost made me laugh, when I inquire about it, it's clear they have no idea what they are saying, they are repeating the argument made to them by someone with a more radical view.
Because there is no 'pushback' on the issue (everyone is afraid), then things get out of tilt.
I'm not sure what the end-game is, but it would be nice if there were some kind of 'centrist' and defensible ideal that people could appeal to that enables execs to make thoughtful decisions about diversity but that aren't based on 'caving out of fear to activism'.
Homeless folks were white men in Montreal? How is that surprising?
The industry preference is for sympathetic stories of Aboriginal, LGBTQQ, PoC etc..
This becomes apparent everywhere there is government or related money, i.e. grant applications for projects, even commercial enterprises.
Of course there's some thoughtful impetus behind this on some level, but these trends become cultish and authoritarian, sometimes promoting some upside down worldviews.
It's just that hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly. To take a coding parallel, it's as if you had a "chief code review officer" to ensure people are doing enough code reviews. We all agree that code reviews are a good thing, and that most companies could do with more of them, but we also think it's a bit silly to have n executive position for it
From the start, there are absolutely people out there who argue diversity is bad and that ultimately we should live in some kind of ethnostate. Then there's a whole gradient of people from that end to people who think the government should force integration in pretty much any semi-public setting. There are definitely people out there arguing diversity is bad. I don't agree with these people, but I at least acknowledge these people do exist.
In this spectrum, there are other people who don't have a problem with diversity but only wish for such things to happen more or less organically. Of course there's a view that if the people making hiring decisions are always a particular kind of world view they're going to usually select people they can self-identify with leading to a self-selection bias that restricts the rate of integration in an organization. Enforcing such integration or not, or the level of such forced integration, is absolutely a diverse range of policy viewpoints largely anchored on base political ideologies.
Your own opinion that "hiring someone specifically for this seems a bit silly" is a view you have based on your ideology. Others don't find it silly, which is their view based on their ideology.
i.e. I'm not saying that selection should be based on skin colour, I'm saying that it's a good long term goal for our institutions (be they fortune 500 companies or universities) to reflect the diversity of our society. There are lots of ways to get there, and american-style racial quotas are definitely not the best way IMHO
As you stated, this functions to benefit the large organizations that can afford the premiums while smaller organizations will go unprotected and pay the costs of the outrage that will be deflected their way.
It's also possible a small to mid size organization gets into some imbroglio on Twitter and realizes they need a CDO to try and stop the bad PR.
It was one in a long string of "jumping the shark" moments for me, as it became clear that, even in a department full of people who were deeply and genuinely concerned about diversity issues, it didn't really matter what was actually done. What mattered were the formal legalistic trappings of it.
These types of formal programs can really backfire as well. I can recall another instance where the college had a sort of endowed faculty line aimed solely at minority hires. The irony was that this had the effect of attracting the most psychopathic elements in the programs, who publicly advocated hiring faculty under this mechanism in a sort of "pump and dump" scheme. That is, the line was in a certain area of research, which certain faculty had made it clear for years they believed was unworthy of hiring in. However, they were happy to advocate hiring using these diversity funds as a way of bringing money into the department, solely as a financial input, with the implication that it didn't really matter what happened to the faculty being hired. So in this sadly ironic way, this line, which was meant to bring in minority hires, ended up hurting minorities, by luring them into positions where they were almost certainly never going to get tenure, just by virtue of the politics of the research area in that program.
To be clear, I'm not actually advocating against diversity programs or officers per se, as I've seen these offices intervene in situations where it was desperately needed. It's almost like the current approaches I've seen have had the effect of creating as many problems as they solved, canceling everything out. It probably mirrors some of what goes on, where the same people aggressively advocating for addressing prejudice with regard to one characteristic can be some of the most bigoted prejudiced people with regard to another characteristic. Or people will change their tunes on diversity issues to suit their financial benefit.