If I can get a women engineer onto a certain team of extremely high performing all male engineers at my firm, I can get a bonus of 20k easily, and hit a DIE initiative goal which is good for my career. It's good for my career unless the team stops performing well, but if I've already leveraged it into another position then who cares ?
These are some of dynamics occurring in reality of many fortune 500 companies right now with recruiters, managers, directors, and executives.
Teams I've created have always been fairly balanced on gender, and it's been good for productivity. When I've taken over all-male teams, and hired women, it's been good for productivity. That's just my experience, and I know it runs counter to some others, but then I've never encountered the difficulties that others have had with hiring talented women who are great assets to their team. It's weird that I'm getting downvoted for what are very reasonable experiences, though. Makes me think that HN is trending more towards politics and less towards news for hackers...
Most recruiting companies filtered non DIE candidates before our pipelines so we had deniability on this as well. Just for perspective, 20k was considered a low-end bonus before the economic downturns.
Measured how, because this sounds like post-hoc rationalization.
If you have to relax standards to hire women, you're doing it 100% wrong and should evaluate your sourcing of candidates. And perhaps the evaluation process and environment itself. Women know bad environments, and capable women will stay far away.