There are disparities companies can fix through hiring practices and ones they can’t. Systemic bias is one they can’t—who Google hires or doesn’t simply doesn’t move the needle on generational poverty. Even if every professional industry does it, that doesn’t move the needle because those industries employ a small fraction of overall workers. Fixing biases and barriers to promotion in service jobs and trades would do vastly more to fix systemic bias, because those industries simply employ vastly more people across a bigger cross section of the work force.

Then there are disparities that better hiring practices can fix, namely correcting the “first and only” problem. Most people just want to fit in, and being the “first and only X” makes that harder. It’s a kind of disparity that exists only because it exists and can be fixed by simply hiring people from diverse backgrounds to achieve a critical mass so that future applicants don’t face that conundrum.