Life is not magically sperate from work. I find that people who do not care about diversity at work, do not care about it in the rest of their life.
Lack of diversity is another way of describing a history of denied opportunities due to the idea that because someone is different from you, they are somehow lesser. Increasing diversity in the workplace just means increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with. If you reflexively don't like this idea, it is probably because somewhere deep down you realise you are going to come up short.
You fundamentally misunderstand what diversity hiring means. It means the exact opposite of "increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with." The counterargument to diversity hiring is a blind meritocracy: you do not discriminate on any characteristic that is not directly related to the skillset that you require. This maximizes the talent pool to literally be everybody and everything that meets the skillset criteria.
Diversity hiring does the opposite, which is that you explicitly discriminate according to an arbitrary quota, on characteristics NOT directly related to the skillset you're hiring for. This heavily restricts your hiring pool.
Let's say I want to hire 20 diverse engineers. In a blind meritocracy, if I've hired 10 engineers that happen to have been white/Asian men, I still have the entire remaining population as potential candidates. In a diversity-quota-based system, I now have to automatically turn away white/Asian male applicants, as the remaining 10 slots are reserved for different demographics.
You are saying that you believe the counterargument to diversity hiring is "the turning away of people believed to be lesser," but that is simply not true. The counterargument is "I don't care if you're white or black, male or female, human or goose, I'm hiring someone who knows how to build a jet engine. If there are more male applicants than female applicants, I'm not going to be bothered by this or go out of my way to hire equally as many female applicants, because being male or female has nothing to do with knowing how to build jet engines."
Not so sure I do misunderstand, in fact I pretty clearly think the reverse. It seems what you are talking about is quotas rather than diversity hiring. Diversity is really more of a lets hire this experienced person from this pool of applicants even though there is a middle class white guy who is just as good. If no-one applies or makes it through your selection process that is not white, straight and middle class, that is a big, red, fucking flag that the issue is probably you. This might take a bit of forward planning and a bit of self examination to avoid bias.
In fact, you may even find that often there are actually quite a lot of people who may not look or talk or think like you, but that are more than capable. How many time have you heard people on HN complain that they were not given a chance with tech xyz, even though they had directly transferable skills in abc?
Anyways, as was the point of my post. People who don't care about diversity at work don't care about it in life. If you think it is not worth your time to be 'bothered' to go out of your way to find (ways of attracting or identifying) a diverse group of people to your endeavour. It is probably just because you fucking love the echo chamber.
Lack of diversity is another way of describing a history of denied opportunities due to the idea that because someone is different from you, they are somehow lesser. Increasing diversity in the workplace just means increasing the potential pool of talented people to work with. If you reflexively don't like this idea, it is probably because somewhere deep down you realise you are going to come up short.
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