Let me just be the devil's advocate here and suggest that (minority) engineers might not enjoy being asked to do public duties unrelated to their actual job in order to give their company an image of being progressive and diverse.
Or it could be that Slack are actually progressive and have a diverse workforce and these developers were very happy to accept an award on behalf of their company due to working in a place that they love working for.
I do see what you're getting at. But this situation at least seems more like four engineers, all women of color, were asked to take on additional public duties to reflect what appears to be a sincere initiative on the part of their company to be progressive and diverse. There's a fairly crucial difference there.
I said as much in my sibling comment. It's dehumanzing to be viewed as a representative of your race when all you want to do is write code and pursue the career you're passionate about.
I think it's also dangerous to provide this PR-esque track for advancement that has nothing to do with your skills. People should be judge by their actual contributions and not who they are.
