This is such a minefield of an issue that I don't envy anyone who has to deal with it. For one, it seems almost impossible to have a rational debate about the issue of diversity because there are some pretty strongly held views on both sides of this.

So just some general observations with an explicit disclaimer that I know nothing that directly relates to this case.

1. I'm personally a little skeptical about a flurry of lawsuits like this. Lawsuits can be a little... opportunistic. I mean this in the sense that they're somewhat predatory and there's a tendency to "pile on" when the other side has a vulnerability. This isn't to say that this or any other given case doesn't have merit. It's just that a flurry tends to raise the chance that any one case of spurious.

2. US CS graduates are still predominantly white males [1] [2]. Obviously there are also graduates outside the US. I'm not sure on numbers on those but it's hard to come up with a reasonable estimation given the fact that a) employment in tech is predominantly US-centric and b) visa quotas in the US artificially limit the number of non-US people you can hire.

3. The graduate figures are important for those who take the so-called pipeline view of workforce diversity, namely that if 20% of graduates in a given field are women then you can't really expect more than 20% of your workforce to be women. This is not a universally agreed principle where some argue you can and should do better than this;

4. Doing better than this seems like nothing more than local vs global optimization. For example, I've known different companies to mandate diversity targets from the executive level and some orgs will deal with this by simply hiring underrepresented groups from other parts of the same company in a classic "robbing Peter to pay Paul" type scenario. It's hard to argue that this does anything more than make some manager or director's numbers look good and nothing more.

5. Other commenters have argued that favouring underrepresented groups is illegal. IANAL but the case law on this in the US isn't so clear. Just look at SCOTUS's rulings on affirmative action eg [3].

6. While some hold the view that you can't discriminate in favour of one group you are by definition discriminating against others. This is both strictly true and too simplistic a view. Specifically, others will argue that you need such "positive discrimination" to correct against bias and historical imbalance.

7. Elements of the majority arguing that there is bias against them isn't of course limited to tech eg [4] [5].

8. One wonders, in situations like this one, that (if true) whether management's instructions (mentioned in the complaint) were a response to an executive edict to increase diversity numbers.

9. Pipeline issues aside, it's worth considering internal long-term diversity trends within a company and within different parts of the company. For example, let's say 25% new hires are women, after 1, 2, 3, 5 or 10 years how does that figure change? Does it stay constant or go up or down? If it goes down, why? This may hint at cultural issues worth addressing.

10. Being an engineer and having worked with lots of engineers I think I can fairly safely say that engineers (IME), as a group, are more socially awkward than the general population. This alone may well be a significant factor in long-term retention of a more diverse workforce.

[1] https://www.computerscience.org/resources/women-in-computer-...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/26/upshot/dont-blame-recruit...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grutter_v._Bollinger

[4] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2017/08/07...

[5] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-ivy-leagues-history-of-di...