Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome, with a small helping of cognitive dissonance. People who favor expediency tend to favor Equality of Outcome.

Equality of Opportunity versus Equality of Outcome, with a small helping of cognitive dissonance. People who favor expediency tend to favor Equality of Outcome. Its the same line of thinking as "zero tolerance" policies in schools; there's some outcome or metric we want to optimize for, and we want the quickest solution to that outcome without considering more expensive or harder solutions. Generally a push for expediency comes from external pressure, not internal standards, culture, or morals. When I see stories like this, my first thought is that Google doesn't actually care about diversity. What they care about is a negative social stigma around a lack of diversity. Alternatively, or maybe additionally, it shows a distinct lack of character development and exposure to the complexity of the real world on the part of those in decision making positions. This is a very difficult one to convince people they're victim to; its essentially telling someone that they're too inexperienced to hold their position, but not by any quantifiable metric, yet they've had no problem meeting the metrics they've been assigned. They're doing their job by every metric they have, but the problem arises in the validity of the metrics themselves and the sustainability of the methods they use. Its the same reason why Engineering teams have architects; you need low-level "expedient" people to implement the tactics of a solution, but you also need strategy at the top to set non-expedient policy and ensure that both the metrics the expedient people work toward are the right ones, and that the methods they use to reach them are sustainable.