Or there could be equal ability, but population-wide differences in preferences, demographics, or other factors. Is it your position that men are underrepresented in teaching and nursing because these fields are highly biased against men? Likewise, there's a significant overrepresentation of Asian in tech. Does the fact that tech hotspots like the Bay Area and Seattle metro have higher than average Asian populations have no role in this disparity?

Claiming to support equal opportunity while simultaneously asserting that inequity necessarily indicates unequal opportunity amounts to a long-winded way of saying that the goal is equal outcomes.

And saying that unless someone believes in equivalency between equity and equality, then they believe in innate differences between groups is very reductive. There are plenty of factors here: culture, preferences, geography, and more.

That's not true. It is a false dichotomy. There are a myriad of reasons you'd find different behaviors or results in different groups of people besides either ingrained innate unchangeable differences and lack of opportunity for that group. Even if you sampled two equally sized samples of equal distribution of the same kind of people (whatever that means to you) you'd find aggregate disparity to some degree. No innate differences at all, and no difference in opportunity based on group membership, you'd still find disparity. Your dichotomy is false.

Additionally, I find this whole assertion I see often nowadays that there's some invisible force creating opportunity disparities between different arbitrary groups of people to be a bit hand-wavy and suspiciously convenient. To me it is comparable to asserting that the disparities are because it was the will of God.

Finally, your statement is a roundabout way of saying "if you don't agree with me you're a racist and I don't talk to racists" and that is extremely dishonest. Frankly, if you don't want to talk to people you don't agree with, why are you on a discussion website at all?

The trick is that life is a series of "opportunities" and equality of opportunity at any particular point of choice generally results in perpetuating any imbalance of opportunity that has occurred before that.

For the sake of illustration, assume two large groups of kids who innately would have had identical ability, but one's growth and education is (on average) more stunted because their families are more likely to be single parent families, or have a parent in jail, or just very poor (which affects a lot), so right now they don't have identical average ability because they did not get equal education and support some decades ago.

If you want to have equal representation of the groups, you'd have to artificially correct for all the previous differences in opportunity - without a time machine, you can't actually fix the differences in their skills and experience (no matter how fairly or unfairly those differences came to be), you can only pretend that those differences don't exist. And so we come to the core issue that granting equal treatment to unequally capable candidates means granting unequal treatment to equally capable candidates, there's no way around it.

And there's also a gap between treating individuals fairly and treating groups fairly. You can't/don't measure the opportunity differences on an individual level, but on a group level, and individual variation in opportunity is huge. In general, any "compensating opportunities" happen at a group level, because if one group is underrepresented under a "background-blind" schema, then it's because lots and lots of capable individuals from that group have "filtered away" and gone on to very different life paths long before applying - and any corrective action or quota system is not helping those individuals who suffered most from the lack of earlier opportunities (because they're already "out"), instead it's granting a larger (compensating) opportunity to other individuals who just happen to be from the same group but had enough opportunity to "stay in the game", while individuals who personally have had so-so opportunities get punished if they happen to come from a group that (on average!) has more opportunities.