Yes, “don’t hire white men” is a much different policy than “please increase your funnel and hire more non white cis hereto men”. I would argue your previous employer more or less just misses the point of these things.
I'm usually hard pressed to find people who disagree with the thought of "we should try to hire people other than white men in a white men dominated profession".
The issue comes when the unspoken (OP's "off the record") enforcement of this is willful hate towards those people.
* - https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...
* - https://www.payscale.com/compensation-today/2020/05/for-nati...
Isn't this not actually true? More families are unable to avoid needing two incomes.
My point is just as in there have been and are people that are willfully malicious and ONLY hire white men/women, it seems we have a hard time accepting there will be some willfully malicious enforcement of a policy such as "we need to make an effort to hire more outside of a gender or race group".
That doesn't make quotas the right solution. More creativity is required, and varies by situation. Which is why I always bristle at the outright rejection of calls for hiring a more diverse group of people without even pretending propose alternatives. Reinforcing the status quo means perpetuating the racism, sexism, etc.
This is the first page:
- why employers favor men
- women outnumber men in the paid workforce
- why employers favor men
- women rehired less than men
- if there is a real gender pay gap, why do firms hire men
(I will spare the readers from remaining five links, but trust me, nothing groundbreaking was there)
Again, this is not to say there's no push to hire men. It's just somewhere "in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard"."
So I don't know how this proves anything either way.
At least on my recent memory, when Fenty Beauty first came on the scene it blew up extremely fast, as it was one of the first major makeup companies specifically catering to non-beige skin colors... the company was founded by the artist Rihanna, who identifies as black.
But on the same side people just can't believe that the middle management and/or line level people responsible for some of these decisions are being malicious.
But in practice "drink more milk" means "drink less soda".
You would also assume that people drink their "max quota" of drinks a day, thus being forced to eliminate something to make room. There's always room for milk my friend.
The request is to hire non-whites and/or non-men.
The clearest way to enforce it is just to specify exactly that - it achieves the stated aims with no cognitive dissonance.