Reminds me of a saying I heard once: “always try and get an asian male doctor because they are discriminated against the most in med school admissions programs. The asian men who made it past the discrimination had to be so much better than the others to make it.”
Say you have a software engineering team, and it's nine men and one woman, and it's that way because the pool you hire out if is 9:1, and you only hire from the top decile.
If someone decrees that Thou Shalt Hire Women, you certainly can...it's just that the candidates you get will be less than in the top decile. If you go as far as to make it to 5:5, then your average man will now be top half decile, and the average woman will be 2.5th decile.
The difference will be obvious, though costly to talk about, and you have just created a situation where the stereotype "women aren't as good as men at software engineering" is true.
That said, I think the problem is that overall there aren't enough qualified under-represented minorities to get up to proportional representation. If there were, it would be a very confusing market failure. What's really going on is two things:
1) You can't be both under-privileged and as capable as everyone else on average. Being poor, abused, discriminated against, etc. affects our ability to do things like be really smart and get good at software engineering.
2) For those who are under-represented but not on average under-privileged (e.g. women in mathematics), we are seeing the result of a difference in preferences between men and women. Blue Team elites really don't want to admit that there are systematic differences in who prefers what that correlate with things like gender and race, but it is obviously the case. It's not rampant sexism relative to biology that explains why there are few women in e.g. mathematics, it's because women prefer to do other things on average. And there's nothing wrong with that, and we as a liberal society need to accept it. Of course, this is absolutely not to claim that women can't be just as good at maths.
“You must be 2x as good as the next [white person] if you want to compete”.
I’m African American and my grandparents, born 100 years ago, would tell me this as a child.
It’s not an uplifting message to hear but just about every non-white person i know has heard a racial or sex-related variation of this statement growing up.
I’ve assume it’s always true because despite all this talk of DEI because to this day - I can count the number of POC and women I have ever worked with on 2 hands.