>"DEIB leads to employee retention, which means there are actually savings on keeping employees in the company longer versus spending money on recruitment to fill those roles..."
These are two points contained within the article, in the paragraphs leading up to the conclusion.
Paradoxically, more profitable companies can afford hiring practices which hurt their bottom line. The causality could easily be the other way around.
Of course it could, though I've come to find this critique pretty weak when two people discuss a study that neither of them has read. You can say it about any topline conclusion about things that are correlated.
The driving factor could be something else - profitable companies could be more attractive to a diverse workforce.
Probably we oughta read the study. I was just pointing out that parent was looking for a business case for diversity in and of itself and seemed to have missed the one the article attempted to provide.
Did the report imply causation from correlation?
You are listing two business cases for retention: do you think tech companies are not aware of the same data? If there was a strong case for keeping employees of a specific demographic, do you think companies would ignore that and prefer to lose more money?
I don't know the answers to your questions. Though I agree the article doesn't back up the claim that layoffs are reducing diversity, except possibly indirectly by references to Twitter, where there are claims layoffs disproportionately affected women.