Avoiding bias in hiring can never be as hamfisted as "hire equal numbers of X always" without causing a ton of harm in the process. Especially when you start trying to always hire an equal number of men and women, every ethnicity, every religion, every spoken language, every sexual orientation, every country of origin, etc. There has to be a balance between being inhospitable to diversity and using discrimination to force arbitrary amounts of diversity.
I fairly certain that assumption does not hold about humans. Our social environment has a direct impact on our work outcomes.
Ergo, simply picking the top best candidates for some individual measure candidates does not guarantee the best work outcomes and so, depending on the effect size, doesn’t necessarily confer any advantage.
We have a woman who was hired on my team at work. As soon as management saw an actual woman had applied, the interview process was just a formality. She has been with us for several months now and has performed abysmally. If she were a white guy she would not have made it in the front door. Working with her is a constant frustration - explaining basic programming concepts and constantly reminding her what the current task is when she gets distracted looking at cat pictures.
The issue is that the male members of the team resent her and our bosses because she's unfireable as a woman. We want in good faith to support women and other demographics that might be interested in our field! We'd love to do whatever we can to foster interest among any human beings at any stage of the pipeline! But what we're coming to realize is that because management needs to meet some "quota", we'll be providing a subsistence for a net-negative-productivity member of the team for the foreseeable future. Nobody can say a word about it to our manager or director for fear of being labeled a sexist. It's making us resent the whole push for diversity as a whole.
This is not the behaviour of someone who is comfortable and enjoying their job. Has anyone reached out to your female colleague to ask if everything is ok. What their goals and aspirations are and how the company can help them reach those?
Could you all just be sitting back watching a team member fail not helping because of their gender and your fear of talking to them / management about them?
This whole situation could it’s self be a manifestation of sexism. Not even intentionally.
Procrastination or “wasting time on instagram” would be better described as a symptom of dissatisfaction or discomfort.
Essentially they have realized that many recruiting and hiring functions are underperforming, in that they are rejecting, or allowing others to reject, talented candidates who they should have hired.
And what they are realizing is that it is much harder than it seems to avoid this kind of error. Which means that even though they can see the opportunity you mention, they're finding that their companies can't seem to seize it.
Generally speaking, everyone involved in hiring is doing their jobs in good faith; there are very few mustache-twirling villains to be found and defeated. But every single person has preferences and biases which, even if essentially harmless on a personal level, can still create significant effects in the aggregate.
So leaders are trying to boot-strap more diverse cultures by managing to the outcome. It's far easier to reward a hiring function for increasing certain metrics of diversity, than tell them something like "be less racist and sexist when hiring." I mean, the vast majority of people would rightly take offense at that kind of guidance from their boss.
The hope is that in the long run, increasing staff diversity produces a broader mix of preferences and biases, which in aggregate reduces the skew against certain talented candidates. As you say: a compounding effect.