The examples I gave are from my own personal experience. If you have a team of people in Seattle developing a product that measures UV, they will first bias th

The examples I gave are from my own personal experience. If you have a team of people in Seattle developing a product that measures UV, they will first bias themselves towards more light exposure (SAD is a huge thing in the Pacific Northwest), give a team from Australia the same job, and they'll look at using it for avoiding too much sun exposure. Another example; Microsoft's original Xbox controller was too big for many people's hands[0] (women, children, and many Japanese users as well). A more diverse team would have made that very obvious. Again, I've witnessed the result of industrial design within a diverse team, the second a physical product doesn't work for a member of the team, everyone starts to feel very differently. Yes in theory you can do a lot of user research and gain a better understanding of your target market, and yes some teams do succeed with that approach. But I've witnessed that personal anecdotes from a team member hold a lot more sway (rightly or wrongly!) than user research studies do. Think of it this way, for the people who were on that Xbox controller design team, for everyone they knew, the controller was a great fit. If at some point they got back a survey result saying that your survey (biased towards white males in their late teens to early 20s) came back with some small % of people having an issue, well, "works for me, and the 100 other engineers on this team" is the reply that will be given. > By your own logic you should mostly hire europeans because, well the EU is the single largest market of high purchasing power individuals. Do you see yourself saying to a capable latinx engineer: "Nope, sorry, your demographic isn't my main consumer target and everyone knows the craftsman has to be as close as possible from the consumer; Sorry, really mate". That is not what I am saying. In fact, I made no argument one way or the other about that. I only replied to a poster who said that they saw NO purpose at all in diversity on a team. I pointed out that diversity on a team can bring in different perspectives and viewpoints. I'm not advocating quotas, I'm advocating not being an asshole when hiring. All in all, I believe it is worth trying to remove bias from the hiring process, because leaving good /talent/ on the table is just plain stupid. As a hiring manager, doing interviews I have had feedback given back to me about candidates implying that due to the candidates ethnicity, that the candidate may not be a good "fit for my team". Crap like that is unacceptable, and leads to rejecting great developers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Controller#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_Controller#History