> You're defining diversity as only diversity of race and gender
I didn't make the definition. The company leadership makes it based on internal feedback, advice and general societal beliefs in what "diversity" means.
> irrelevant and unchangeable physical characteristics that have nothing to do with a person's individual character
I agree - everyone should be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. However, it is difficult to judge someone's character alone from a CV.
> You're making decisions not on competence but on subjective biases and your perception of wrongs that have nothing to do with merit.
Every person I'd hire deserves to be hired. There are no bones thrown to fill a quota (which doesn't exist). However, to help achieve the goal of a "diverse workplace" a systemic method needs to be incorporated to ensure that a diverse set of candidates were given an opportunity to join the interview pool. With a large enough pool we can reasonably assure that every hire is hired on merit alone as they will be competing with other people that have different immutable physical characteristics. This also means if the hires tend to all look a certain way I can reference the systemic method used to ensure that in fact we actually removed bias from the selection process by ensuring certain attributes were included in the overall pool.
> There is no "ideal diverse workforce".
Ask 1000 people and you'll get 1000 answers.
> By forcing a particular set number of people in each arbitrary group, you are absolutely designing for an outcome, not opportunity.
No, you are creating a pool that is defensible in terms of who you end up hiring. No one is guaranteed a job because they are in the candidate pool. They will compete with their cohort on equal grounds.
> You did not give anyone who applied an opportunity to be hired, you demanded a specific "heuristic across the group" based on nothing but what someone looks like, on biological features that nobody has control over.
See, this is where you're making a mistake. The specific heuristic across the group includes everyone. It doesn't say "not white males in their 20's" - in fact 9 out of 12 candidates could be just that so long as the other 3 candidates somehow cover every other enumeration of attributes. But with a large enough pool you can ensure that each characteristic the company determines is "diverse" is somehow included in the candidate pool without diluting it in terms of merit. This doesn't mean the outcome looks anything like the candidate pool.
> This is completely opposite of making things as fair as possible, and I am truly lost at how you are rationalizing this.
Fair enough - I don't know your thoughts but it could be from the point of view you're looking at if from. To me, you sound like someone who thinks a systematic method of candidate pool selection sounds like exclusion of certain people. And it would be if we excluded certain candidates because they didn't possess an arbitrary diversity attribute. However, this process is inclusive because it demands that each enumeration of each diversity attribute be included at least once. And with a large enough candidate pool (this is key - you need to do the work here interviewing enough people) this means there are still very many seats for the dominate attribute enumeration - white guys that are youngish as it happens to be.
However, it would be an illegitimate candidate pool if there wasn't a white person in it, or a male in it, or a young person in it as well! That would be exclusionary.
This is a pragmatic approach to fulfilling a diversity goal (regardless of if my personal beliefs are different) while ensuring that there is no exclusion, that the quality of hires remains at the level desired and most importantly that nobody who is hired or anyone they work with has any reason to believe they only got the job because they won diversity bingo.