"Diversity in points of view" is not an unalloyed good. There are significant coordination costs associated with it.
It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.
"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.
> Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.
I don't agree with that statement. At the very least, everyone acknowledges that women and men in the same environment have vastly different viewpoints from each other. (Source: Approx. 50% of all jokes, also science) I think that ethnic diversity will also result in more diverse viewpoints, even when passed through "purifying filters" such as elite college acceptance standards.
Well, maybe I didn't phrase it very well. What I mean is that in my experience, women consistently bring unexpected perspectives to my attention that are attributable to the differences in life experience between men and women in the same society, even in subjects and areas where I wouldn't expect these differences to be relevant. So I definitely see the benefit of having a more balanced ratio of men and women in the workplace, regardless of what the work consists of.
It is also not something you get when you attempt to recruit people from the same sources and socio-cultural milieus with the same acceptance criteria, but of different genders and ethnicities. Hiring an ethnically diverse range of, eg, MIT/CMU/Stanford graduates does not engender diverse viewpoints.
"If you want the best people working at your company, you should want a group with similar demographics as the customer population". Huh. So, if most of my sales of akvavit are to expat Finns, I should certainly not hire a German to do my security audits. And if most of my sales of peat-optimized spades are to the Irish market, I should certainly not contract out the manufacturing to the great industrial base of Shenzhen. This seems rather insensible and possibly bigoted to me.