Anecdotal, but I noticed this too in my last two employments. We would give coding tests and the scoring threshold for women would be greatly reduced, because we wanted to have more women around, instead of just guys.
Then there would be some really nasty pressure from HR to hire those candidates.
Then late last year our engineering leadership said that they were creating a director level position exclusively for a female person of color that would be an outside hire, which I'm pretty certain is illegal. Though they still haven't done that yet.