Wait, there's actually a position called "Head of Diversity"?
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSKBN1522O6
But you don't want too few asian people because you'll get sued for that:
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-palantir-tech-discriminati...
It's kind of a Goldilocks thing. And you need a c-suite executive to make sure you're playing the game just right.
I can see you're an intelligent person and have some knowledge of this issue, which leads me to think you already understand the basis of diversity policies very well and are simply choosing to mischaracterize it.
It is enough that well known/top companies have demographics that are similar to the undergrad CS demographics of Berkeley/Stanford/MIT/etc., whether or not those demographics are reflective of the general population
Managing that policy isn't normally a separate position.
If companies cared about real diversity rather than the illusion of diversity, they would blind their own interview process to any factors not directly related to job duties.
A truly diverse company can potentially produce a wider variety of creative options, as a lesser overlap in skills and experiences produces greater coverage of a problem space with the same number of people investigating it. It isn't just about age, sex, color, or religion. It's about the cities lived in, the neighbors barely tolerated, the pets kept, the hobbies enjoyed, the music listened to, the crazy acquaintance stories, the routes taken on the daily commute, and quite a lot of other things selected against when seeking out "culture fit".
Otherwise, "head of diversity" sounds like a nice, cushy sinecure, with a gratuitously large budget to waste. Diversity is the responsibility of the entire personnel/HR department, and can't be meaningfully delegated to one figurehead.
That would be good for cases when you need someone who can jump in immediately, and you have their job requirements nailed down ahead of time. But sometimes you need to gauge a person's potential for growth into a position. And as FT_intern pointed out, often you want to know how the person will do with a particular team. That's really hard to do in a blind test.
Blind testing is not so difficult that it isn't worth doing. Last week, the spouse and I did a blind taste test of nine different beers. We got someone else to pour them into numbered cups and rated the contents of the cups without pre-existing biases. You just have to interview in such a way that no one can see the candidates' labels.
Would it really be that awful to use a telepresence robot with text-to-speech in an interview? That would allow the candidate to see and hear everybody else, but no one would know anything about them other than what they typed in a chat box.
This is assuming that the diverse candidates who actually have talent aren't being hired. That's the argument you need to be making
> Your teams will be better at problem-solving if they have diverse backgrounds and outlooks
If you want teams that are better at problem-solving, why don't you directly judge applicants based on their problem-solving abilities in a team environment instead of using diversity as a proxy for problem solving ability (which has not been proven at all)?
The other, more probable interpretation is that it is a pipeline problem. Try comparing their demographics with Bay Area, top school and CS demographics.
Edit: These numbers vary wildly for other companies in the same location, so I'm not sure a comparison with them proves anything. https://hackerlife.co/blog/tech-companies-diversity/San-Fran...
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/06/pinterest-hires-its-first-...
I think the question is: What does the role actually do? The cynic in me says it exists to signal that your company cares about diversity. Okay, but after the hiring decision is made, based on whatever criteria make the company properly diverse, what happens? Does this person act as a recruiter for underrepresented people?
We might as well take into account their financial background too, for example whether their parents grew up poor. It's about as relevant as someone's race, gender, and sexual orientation when it comes to hiring decisions.
Unless it's actually all about scoring useless PR points, or, more sinisterly, cowing to the demands of progressive extremists that threaten violence and negative media exposure. If that's what it's about then we can safely assume race, gender, and sexual orientation are irrelevant when it comes to hiring practices, and instead we can just hire random people that seem remotely qualified (which is what we have already been doing before this madness began).