>If it comes down to the flip of a coin, why not add more diverse opinions if the team is male-heavy. Likewise if the team is female-heavy.
What is the value of having an equal number of men and women? What is a "diverse opinion"? If you hire a woman over a man because of the "diverse opinion" you expect her to bring, and her opinions end up being the same as the men on her team, will you be disappointed at the lack of ideological diversity you expected her to provide? Will she feel marginalized for her opinions not being "diverse" enough?
These feel like reasonable questions - you are implying having gender diversity will bring ideological diversity, that is, men have different ideas than women, and that this difference is valuable. However, won't that assumption also lead to women feeling that their value is diminished if their opinions aren't different enough from men, if that is the basis upon which you hire them?
If you hire a woman over a man because of the "diverse opinion" you expect her to bring
Right, this is what I like to call the Google Fallacy. If you have a team that represents all genders, races, etc etc but they are all recent graduates of the same handful of CS programmes, then where does the diversity of opinions actually come from? This is why Google keeps making products and abandoning them when they fail to gain traction, or produce public disgust like Glass. To be actually diverse companies must move beyond the tickybox culture of just looking at gender and colour and look at actual lived experiences.
