> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...

One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.

But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.

That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.

Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.

That sounds like a sexist stereotype to me. Men and women are the same in all the ways that matter, except for the small percentage of areas where we forget that and admit they act differently because it gives us an excuse to treat women better? Please.