Diversity brings new perspectives and those new perspectives drive improvements to a company's culture and output. It's that simple.

Link to a single study I found easily, but there are many more. If you want your company to be successful, it behooves you to diversify your workforce as much as possible on every possible axis.

Well yeah that's what DEI does on the whole. It gets the workplace hiring people based on their skills. You're very close to getting it.

You know why people moved to the west coast and grew Hollywood? It's because Thomas Edison was a flaming sack of shit who exploited and claimed every invention that anyone who ever worked for him made. So what did these very smart people do? They all went to Hollywood and completely blew away Edison's pathetic movie business. They did this BECAUSE of diversity and BECAUSE all of the old guard were no longer in the way.

If you want a successful company, you want diversity. If you don't go diverse, then you end up doing stupid things like make face recognition technologies that cannot recognize the faces of Asians (this happened) or will constantly misidentify black people for arrest (this also happened).

The problem was the statistically proven fact that left to their own devices will try and fill a role based on the idea of what they think the person who fills that role will look like in their head, and for most positions that looks like a white guy.

A few decades ago the fact that major companies were routinely and systematically passing over more qualified not white men in favor of under qualified white men who looked the part induced a public backlash big enough that many major corporations were forced to at least publicly pretend that they were implementing a watered down version of the plan to equitise these barriers that was fought for by a guy called Martin Luther King Jr.

This resulted in a cooperate data driven approach to level these barriers to ensure that the most qualified candidate for the position was hired instead of the candidate who mearly looked like the candidate who closest matched the image the hiring manager had in their head called Affirmative Action.

This data driven approach didn’t really work and the public kept complaining that the difference in who got hired based on who looked whitest was continuing, so companies began working on researching and educating their hiring managers on these subconscious bias through a broad range of programs classified as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in hiring and the workplace.

Then the right complained that dispite the fact that white men were still getting hired easier and had a lower bar to pass than everyone else that really they were the ones being reverse racismed based on vibes because they needed a way to explain that the reason it’s hard to get a job and work sucks wasn’t because of decades of continuous free market policy and the rile up the base and show that the Jews and Blacks were replacing all the good white people. Now here we are.

See I don't disagree with that logic, but there are lots of folks who will instantly discount a candidate because they're ignorant. We wouldn't need any diversity if we were honest with ourselves but the last few years especially since Trump praised the white nationalists in Charlottesville, where racists think it's okay to be racist.

It's not okay, dislike someone because their an asshole not because of a shade of color

Edit: also should not be sexist discriminate on age