Sadly this battle is lost. I understand affirmative action and the need to do it if there has been some systematic bias preventing outcomes but this has become such a touchy topic that how it is done is not debatable lest you be seen sexist.
I have sat in hiring debriefs where the criterias used for selection have been very subjective but no one will want to acknowledge that they are trying to do positive bias to do affirmative action.
More effort is put on taping things at the end of the funnel rather than fixing things at start, if there are things that need fixing. When metrics of managers and DEI employees are measured on short term impact, why would they not take the easy way out.
I don't think it's "lost." At least with regard to racial preferences in the workplace, they remain unpopular even among the very groups they seek to help: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe... (Black people oppose "taking race and ethnicity into account ... in order to increase diversity" 54 to 37, and Hispanics oppose it 69 to 27).
Separating people into groups and giving preferences and demerits based on skin color is social engineering mainly being championed by the same people who have always favored social engineering: affluent, college-educated white people. Those folks hold a lot of power in some circles, but are routinely defeated at the ballot box: https://thehill.com/opinion/education/526642-hispanics-shock...
After conducting an interview, before I had a chance to write my review (which was customary, while it was fresh), I was sat down by someone more senior than me who said, explicitly "we are hiring this person." There was a "wink wink" dynamic to it. This person was pretty inexperienced, but a woman. This never happened with any of the male candidates. We hired her.
Unrelated, it turned out to be a horrible fit for her, because she went way out on a limb to move to the area and take the job, and the company shut down a few months later. She was now in an expensive city with no contacts or prospects.
Getting a job and then immediately loosing it is obviously a bad fit for everyone, running the whole hiring process in the first place that close to folding seems pretty dishonest.
I remember there was a conversation about this from some of the managers. It was basically, "we don't know if things will go south, so we need to operate as normal." It did definitely feel wrong.
I have sat in hiring debriefs where the criterias used for selection have been very subjective but no one will want to acknowledge that they are trying to do positive bias to do affirmative action.
More effort is put on taping things at the end of the funnel rather than fixing things at start, if there are things that need fixing. When metrics of managers and DEI employees are measured on short term impact, why would they not take the easy way out.