A lot of companies try to have their cake and eat it too, and continue practices they know will lead them to stay white and male while putting together "diversity committees" and the like to appeal to minorities.
E.g. my ex works for a bank where she is on a diversity commitee, where the constant frustration is that the bank is only willing to take actions that everyone knows will have very little effect: The underlying problem is that they continue to insist to hire mainly from schools that predominantly have students from wealthy families, and are skewed heavily towards white students to the extent that if they took the entire graduating classes for the next decade without considering results, they'd still not solve their diversity problems.
But any suggestion of widening their search to less elitist schools and focus on results instead gets shot down instantly.
Thus they remain mostly white, while holding all kinds of diversity events etc. to look like they're trying hard to solve the problem.
To be fair to them, they're happy enough to hire minorities from those schools. The point is they know that will not address their imbalance, and all their other diversity work is window dressing. I don't think it's because they have anything against hiring non-white people, but simply because they care more about the prestige of the schools they hire from than they care about diversity (even if you could guarantee to only consider candidates with equally good results).
Any school were admission is wealth driven has a diversity problem, and it is self-perpetuating.
As for whether it is fine, that depends on whether they actually care about their diversity goals, and whether prestige is in fact more important to them than job performance. I'd argue that it is likely "prestige" here is simply used to enforce informal social connections and to some extent to avoid diversity at the cost of job performance. If I'd been an investor of said bank, I'd consider it a major concern.
No, I'm saying investors should be concerned that they are preferring prestige rather than hiring the best candidates regardless of school background, and that given how unrepresentative the schools they hire from are, this is contributing to keeping diversity down and makes a mockery of their own stated commitments.
The internal data that the group that is tasked with improving diversity (and that is largely being ignored) at this particular bank shows that being equally strict about results but considering a wider range of schools would increase diversity and would allow them to actualy do so while making their hiring cirteria stricter. This gets brushed aside, and then the bank keeps complaining about how hard it is to be more diverse afterwards.
In other worse: They are hiring less qualified candidates and use the prestige of the schools as an excuse for avoiding hiring more qualified candidates that would also bring more diversity.
E.g. my ex works for a bank where she is on a diversity commitee, where the constant frustration is that the bank is only willing to take actions that everyone knows will have very little effect: The underlying problem is that they continue to insist to hire mainly from schools that predominantly have students from wealthy families, and are skewed heavily towards white students to the extent that if they took the entire graduating classes for the next decade without considering results, they'd still not solve their diversity problems.
But any suggestion of widening their search to less elitist schools and focus on results instead gets shot down instantly.
Thus they remain mostly white, while holding all kinds of diversity events etc. to look like they're trying hard to solve the problem.
To be fair to them, they're happy enough to hire minorities from those schools. The point is they know that will not address their imbalance, and all their other diversity work is window dressing. I don't think it's because they have anything against hiring non-white people, but simply because they care more about the prestige of the schools they hire from than they care about diversity (even if you could guarantee to only consider candidates with equally good results).
I think you will find this many places.