In no company in the world is this a "diversity policy." Diversity policies are the exact opposite of this. If they were as you describe, I'm sure the the author of the memo, and everyone who agrees with it, would be completely in support of them.
The only people selected were men.
That conference was canceled because it didn’t stand with Github’s stance on diversity, etc.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868
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Companies actively do the exact opposite because they need/want more diversity. It’s absolutely not like the music world where a large amount of women play instruments... the number of women in CS professionally is low. The number of female CS graduates is and has been low.
Simply stripping info doesn’t mean anything if at the end of the day a diversity agenda has to be met.
It would be a farce and ridiculous if 100 talks were submitted, and 99 of them were <gasp> males, and then they shut down and complain because no females were chosen.
It's called statistics.
Even if there are factors that mean there will never be 50% female submitters, a proper diversity policy means the organizer sees this as a symptom of a problem they can help solve. Perhaps if a conference can keep at least 1/3 female speakers every year then 25% of submissions will be from women in 10 years? And perhaps if 1/3 speakers are women, more women will visit the conference, widening the audience?
The whole point of active diversity policy is that the status quo is to be changed by active means.
I was responding to a non-expert's cost-benefit analysis that confused the part-- a specific type of diversity policy-- with the whole-- the set of possible diversity policies. She generalized a set of trade-offs and claimed unasked/unanswered questions around the field based off that part. I referred to a well-known historical diversity policy for which her proposed trade-off does not exist.
That ought to arouse skepticism that a non-expert who isn't genre-literate in the field is able to find the best solution to the problem.