C-level executives would flag certain job openings as only eligible for women or minorities. I clearly remember a meeting where our CTO declared that he had rejected an extremely qualified male candidate because "we have enough of those".
When some people complained they started hiding the details, but it was still obvious. There would be hiring rounds where the only candidates coming from HR were dozens of women for a specific role. After interviewing all of them and giving several second chances we couldn't find anyone qualified in that batch of candidates, so there was a very tense meeting where we were heavily pressured to just pick one.
You could tell a lot of the candidates involved in this process were catching on and/or being pandered to and they really didn't like it either.