It's highly likely. Much likelier than the idea that having anti-discrimination so broadly enforced that a mere IQ test is illegal would not cause corporations to take steps to reduce legal risks.
But you are correct, my evidence is circumstantial, and if you really want to disbelieve such basic inference, you can. I'm sure you apply this degree of skepticism evenly.
Your argument is that every single company with a DEI program is doing so out of concern for a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening --- or, for that matter, even circumstantial evidence, such as a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits. By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them. These are extraordinary claims, for which you have offered no evidence.
IQ tests, for what it's worth, are not in fact illegal in employment situations. I can name large software companies that were using them as recently as a few years ago. Of course, they're a cringeworthy affectation and a strong signal of a shop you'd never want to work in, but being off-putting isn't illegal, as over 10 years of my own activity on Hacker News should amply establish.
For my part: I am not a fan of institutional DEI programs. But I'm even less a fan of the rhetorical frame that suggests that literally everything and everybody involved in them is operating in bad faith.
> By implication, you are also arguing that all the companies running these programs don't believe the things they're saying, but rather have been coerced into saying them
I'm arguing no such thing. Hiring of people that espouse and practice DEI has been legally incentivized. Whether they believe in them or not doesn't matter, and after the law got the ball rolling (and made sure it stays rolling even in companies that otherwise wouldn't cooperate), it's perfectly likely lots of true believers would also join.
In fact, I implied the opposite in my root comment ("plus positive-reinforcement as the alumni of these institutions take up influential positions in society"), which you would have known if you weren't busy coming up with the most bad-faith interpretation of my words that you could find.
> a legal threat so amorphous that we can't come up with a single instance of it happening
I literally linked to a legal case of it happening in my root comment. Unless you want a lawsuit specifically about a missing DEI program, something which I never claimed, and already explained so.
> a correlation between the deployment of DEI programs and the number of discrimination lawsuits.
Notice how both trend upwards, therefore are correlated. Unfortunately I don't think there's a graph like that specifically for DEI programs, as "equity" itself is a word that only recently became fashionable. And I couldn't find a graph showing the proportion of companies with generic diversity programs either. A crucial weakness in my argument, that will allow a motivated reader such as yourself to dismiss it entirely.
DEI programs don't help guard vs. litigation, therefore that can't ever have been a cause for their or their antecedents' inception!
> discrimination suits are decreasing
If the problem DEI programs are intended to address was shrinking, then DEI programs would have shrunk with it! No different than how you shrink police forces after crime significantly drops.
