This is probably the biggest reason, they are building products used by virtually everyone on the planet, they cannot afford mistakes that could arise just because their employees only represent a small percentage of human diversity. If all diverse groups were equally well-off, or all they understood the existence and power of privilege, or there was no risk of the built products putting certain groups at a disadvantage, maybe we wouldn't need to do this. But we know that's not true.
Age is somewhat prioritized in practice. Why do you think political diversity would be similarly prioritized?
There's a moral argument that comes into play with politics that doesn't for age or race. There's nothing even abstractly morally problematic about making your product appeal to women or old people or whomever. There may be reasons to avoid marketing or aligning your product to, say, people whose political views you disagree with.
We're not talking about products aimed at a particular demographic. We're talking about products with customers from diverse demographic backgrounds, where the argument is put that we should then have a diverse team so as to ensure we are serving that product competently to the diverse customer base.
My point is that this can't be the real reason for D and I initiatives, since if it was, there would be a similarly strong push to have equal political and age representation in order to reflect the reality of these products' customer demographics.
The priorities won't change because the priorities were never stemming from an earnest attempt to represent customer demographics to begin with.
Not only is there no attempt to represent customer demographics on dimensions such as age, but there continues to be rank discrimination against people based on these dimensions, and the people pretending to be in favor of diversity are consistently and conspicuously silent on the matter.
