Multiple issues:

- First, this is not an either/or situation. You can assess personality, skills, and experience in traditional ways, while simultaneously understanding that having a diverse collection of genders, races, ages, disabilities, etc on a team is often a competitive strength. You don't have to throw away people's CVs to do any of this.

There's an assumption that I see sometimes that caring about diversity during hiring necessarily means ignoring everything else, and that's just not what people like me are saying to do at all.

- Second, the role of a head of diversity should go way beyond simple hiring decisions, it can also mean trying to make a more welcoming environment that accommodates diverse workforces after they're hired, it can mean trying to explain why certain demographic outcomes and trends exist in hiring, and trying to figure out on a high level if there are areas where Google is biasing its hiring process or culture to be less diverse.

It should be kind of obvious, but Kamau wasn't just sorting applications based on skin color -- you wouldn't need multiple people and a "head" to do that. A diversity initiative is supposed to look at the entire company, identify subtle problems in multiple areas/departments, and come up with creative solutions to those problems.

- Third, I think you're discounting life experience in general as a contributing factor towards how people make decisions. It's not "you're brownish, that's nice." It's "Black people want to use our products, is there someone in the room who's going to notice if our AI mislabels them in photos?" It's "we want our UI to be usable by blind people, it would be nice if we had anyone in our office that can identify certain pitfalls." It's "we're designing a social network feature that will accidentally make doxing much easier, what are the odds someone who's LGBT+ in our office will raise their hand and point out how dangerous this is for their community?"

Those aren't theoretical concerns, they're issues that companies like Google care a lot about for very practical reasons. So it's a big jump to act like political diversity, age, life experiences don't impact how products get made. Understanding diversity means both acknowledging that these communities are fuzzy and that not everyone in them is identical, and also acknowledging that on net people in these communities have experiences and perspectives that can be valuable to incorporate into decision making processes.

- Fourth, you're missing that many diversity initiatives in companies don't exist in a vacuum. Google has a diversity initiative because it has problems with diversity, because there are unreasonable biases in its hiring processes and recruitment strategies against older, POC, and other minority applicants. Diversity initiatives in companies like this don't just randomly appear out of nowhere. They're not trying to get rid of good hiring practices, they're a response to existing flaws in the hiring process.

It's all well and good to argue that hiring processes should be egalitarian and that diversity will naturally arise if we ignore the categories. But the current outcomes aren't egalitarian, and ignoring the categories didn't lead to natural diversity. Argue if you want that the kind of diversity I'm talking about is irrelevant to quality, but doing so really only reinforces that the lack of diversity across the tech industry is abnormal and it's worth having teams inside of companies who try to figure out why their hiring outcomes seem to be biased in certain directions.