Those situations you are describing are discrimination. At least by the meaning of ‘a choice based off criteria’. The vast majority of them are legally just fine, but as you note produce a specific, rather predictable outcome yes?

Some discrimination is perfectly fine (generally when it is a legitimate requirement of the job). For instance, hiring vivacious young women for a stripper job? Perfectly acceptable per the gov’t. Same
with hiring only men of a specific age, and ‘build’ for male underwear models.

Some legally not fine criteria, would be for example if your wife threw out any black sounding names. Or any women that sounded young enough to be having kids soon. Or foreigners.

But many of those legally fine criteria are, practically, can be somewhat effective proxies for illegal discrimination, yes?

Someone not getting an opportunity because of some consistent criteria, especially a criteria they cannot change, and especially one that is not related to the actual performance of the job, is taking away an opportunity. You are quite right though, that it happens every day, and is a necessary part of hiring.

Civil rights laws are to help stop large classes of people from being from being consistently screwed because they are consistently losing opportunities based on some criteria that society judges should be protected. It’s a small list, but includes race, national origin, gender, etc.

DEI has come about (or chicken/egg? Resulted in?) a re-interpretation of Civil rights and labor law enforcement that says for larger companies, the actual composition of the employees hired, on coarse criteria (such as gender/sex, race, etc), must roughly match the overall population, or that is de facto evidence of discrimination. I can link to some DOL consent decrees if you don’t believe me.

In some areas (like Gov’t contractors/employment), this has been required for decades. There are explicit Gov’t mandates for Affirmative Action, which requires employers who meet certain criteria to actively discriminate based on otherwise legally protected classes like race to ensure they hire enough of each category. It’s after all practically impossible to end up with X% of a certain race/gender/whatever if you never keep track of, or make decisions in hiring, based on it eh?

For larger companies, it’s generally been less required, and a more lenient ‘someone needs to have been explicitly using illegal discrimination’ standard was used. Until relatively recently.

A number of companies have gotten huge fines over the years (including Google, among others) because the composition of the employees hired and their pay did not align with expected population wide statistical norms. You’ve almost certainly heard it as one group being ‘overrepresented’.

Well, when hiring freezes/stops, or there are layoffs, guess what happens to that ‘over represented’ group disproportionately?

Notably, this entire post is because Trump is changing the criteria so that it is no longer required that companies meet the ‘in proportion to the population’ standard, and rather that someone has to prove they are actually discriminating illegally on race.

Which, since you have to actual discriminate on race to do affirmative action, seems to defacto make Affirmative Action illegal?

Or at least makes de facto (but not explicit) discrimination on an otherwise protected class just fine again for large companies.