The idea behind these initiatives is not to enforce quotas, and bring dumbasses in to your firm. Anyone trying to tell you that's what these initiatives want is pushing an agenda at you, and is trying to manipulate you.
What these sorts of initiatives try to do is to minimise the effect of the biases that every single one of us has. Simple things can be done to have a big effect.
Removing the names, ages, and pictures from resumes before they are given to the managers and staff to assess, means people have to focus on the actual experiences of the applicant. And perhaps you think that's being silly, but there have been numerous studies done (look online, a quick google search should find them), where one person has submitted the exact same resume but with different names (a white sounding name, and, for example, an arab name) to a job application. Despite having exactly the same credentials, the arab name will get an interview 50+% less often than the white name. It goes for other minority sounding names as well. Simply removing the names, ages and photos, removes the opportunity for the biases to be activated and means that only the candidates with the best resumes get interviews.
Having multiple people involved in interviews can also help to remove biases as a single interviewer will naturally lean into their biases (even unconsciously). Multiple interviewers (preferably from different backgrounds) will have different biases and hopefully balance out and as such hire the best candidates regardless of bias.
Judging potential employees based on actual experience and ability rather than on which university they have attended (or not attended, if they have come through some other way into the industry) is a better way of getting diversity, rather than relying on only taking people with degrees from an Ivy League university or who have studied one specific branch of engineering. A lot of people from minority backgrounds don't have the opportunities to go to the top end uni's or through the traditional routes but that does not mean they are worse candidates than those that have (often they are better as they have had to work harder to get to the same position). Recognising this, means you have a larger pool to take candidates from. But a lot of firms are stuck always hiring people from the same schools or same background and so are stuck hiring the same type of people all of the time, and miss out on getting the benefits of diversity.
These are the things you're trying to achieve with these initiatives. Calling out a company for having low diversity is not about trying to force it to hire idiots just to balance a quota. It's about calling out a company for not putting into practice the simple things that allow a greater pool of people to be considered, filtered, and consequently chosen. The firms should still be choosing the best people, but no longer should the choices of people being hired, be limited by the biases in the people and processes doing the hiring...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
