I think many of the things you mentioned w.r.t. diversity is actually forward-thinking and potentially yields more returns later. If there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches, they won't work there. Same goes for hiring a "less-qualified" individual. How many decisions or projects can be improved because of a diversity of input? Again, a non-linear outcome that is harder to measure than immediate profitability. Those are some arguments for those programs focusing on your productivity point.
I guess my issue is that unless done well it's very often just disruptive. At the place I work the exec team is currently pushing diversity as a major goal and have told us explicitly that there are too many old white men at the company - especially within senior positions.
Since the push to replace white male leaders our corporate Jabber board has been filled with nothing but arguments about race with one side of the opinion that white male leaders need to immediately step down and make way for others, and the other arguing that this is a racist corporate policy which makes them feel unwelcome and without any path to career progression.
I kinda get both sides of the argument, but the focus on diversity was a key catalyst to the problems we now have with diversity at the company. Had the execs just not taken a stance on the ideal racial demographics of the employees we'd probably not be fighting about it.
I see your point and agree it can be frustrating if DEI initiatives are used as a political tool or blindly without considering the pitfalls of a naive implementation.
The issue with your arguments in response is the issue with the entire way DEI is structured in industry. It's not that diversity is unimportant, diversity of /thoughts/ and /beliefs/ is critical to building products that appeal to the widest audience/target market. It's that the way programs are implemented focus on the wrong things, and worse are based on this type of wishy-washy thinking.
Your argument amounts to a completely unsubstantiated what-if "[What] if there's a brilliant swe that feels uncomfortable at a company because of how they name their branches..."
Here's a counter-argument: Productive driven people don't get distracted by irrelevant and petty things like what the repository branch is named in the private repo that no customer ever sees. This is the type of petty nonsense that bureaucracy loves though, and bureaucracy kills innovation, creativity, and productivity. The entire issue with DEI isn't that opponents think diversity is bad, or that we're against hiring people from diverse backgrounds, it's that the way DEI is implemented is a cancerous bureaucracy that kills companies and teams.
It's just another form of the massive spread of administration/non-productive management across large organizations within the West. There's now close to (or in excess of) 1:1 administrators to faculty in most universities in the US, and the majority of the administrative hires are in DEI. These bureaucracies work to advance the bureaucracy, not to advance the mission of the organization they purport to represent. The massive waste of money on administration in hospitals, insurance companies, universities, and large corporations does not make these organizations improve patient outcomes, improve education of students, reduce medical costs to society, or improve products in the market that people rely on in their day to day lives. It's just a huge pile of burning money supporting the existence of roles that effectively detract from the overall productivity and quality of organizations.
This isn't just DEI, by the way, it's all forms of unnecessary bureaucracy. It's one of the reasons why we need stronger anti-trust, because this is an inherent cancer to large organizations. The only solution for which is to have smaller organizations in the first place, so they can be razor focused on their actual core mission and not burning mountains of cash on administrative boondoggles.
Indeed, I didn't cite any sources but I'm fairly sure there's literature studying this phenomenon. I agree that DEI when used as a political tool is a distraction for a company.
