For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
I'm not an engineer, so can someone explain to me why a lack of diversity is a disadvantage from an engineering perspective?
Currently it just sounds like woke bullshit infiltrating STEM.
For certain classes of problem having some amount of diversity when developing a solution can provide some variation in test inputs if the requirements aren't fully understood. For example, if you are developing a speech recognition system, having developers with different accents can help the system deal with those different accents early in the development cycle instead of later in the testing cycle.
There is also something to be said about different people having different thought processes for approaching a given problem, though that isn't guaranteed just by virtue of their skin color or genitals.
That said, if you are aware that these sorts of problems exist you can plan your development/test cycle without needing diversity in your engineers. In my example you could solve the problem by having non-engineers with different accents provide sample audio of themselves speaking. The benefit of this approach is that it is more reproducible and allows for a consistent test suite as you make changes/improvements. The risk is you don't always know the full scope of these sorts or problems/variations early in the development cycle, and they may be costly to address later on.
Personally I wouldn't go out of my way to make a "diverse" team of engineers to mitigate that type of problem. I'd rather have a non-diverse team of competent engineers I could trust to ensure the requirements were as comprehensive as possible and minimize the number of "hidden" requirements to be discovered as development progressed.
Solid and sensible answer, thanks.