Is there a refutation to the argument that all these "diversity for diversity's sake" programs, this sort of frantic insistence upstream to achieve diversity at all costs, produces some less than qualified candidates?

In every institution I've ever been at, people talked about how to recruit more women, but in practice this meant grabbing the first woman who applied and using them as a prop to show how diverse they were. Professors have blatantly admitted to my female friends that they were being used for that purpose.