Perhaps I wasn't as clear as possible. Even before DEI was "a thing", at least in the 90's and 2000's when I was involved in them, the US Navy required all promotion and selection boards to have a minority and female member (yes, among the other 8 probably white males) to ensure that the process was properly considering all aspects of the services desire to ensure properly qualified female and minorities were promoted to the max extent possible, which was generally stated as a precept of each board.

Over those periods, depending on the economy, manning, and needs of the service, sometimes it was easy to promote as many as possible. Sometimes the conditions made it so the selection rates were very slim.

My whole point of recalling the picture in record decision was that before that decision, it was assumed that if enough women and minorities didn't get selected it was because some on the board saw the picture and were racist/sexist (despite women and minorities being on the board).
But the reality proved quickly, without the picture, board members could not tell who to give extra consideration to, and selection rates fell when just considering records.

The Navy used to consider "pain points" when looking at records so a sailor/airmen that had done many deployments would generally been considered ahead of another that had less. I remember the female board rep usually giving the reminder that a female that was making the Navy a career and also desired a family was bound to be more constrained to volunteering for Navy pain for the sake of advancement, likewise the minority rep would remind board members that many minority sailors/airmen came from disadvantaged backgrounds so if it took a bit for them to hit their stride in their career, that may be a possible explanations. Never were we encouraged to promote anyone who wasn't qualifiied, it was just often the promotion/selection boards were quite competitve so there were more qualified personnel than were to be selected.

This was all before I had ever even heard of DEI. The Navy always has tried hard to find/train and promote minority leadership. But so has most companies, so the competition for the same talent is tight.

Respectfully, this is at best a short sighted take. Aside from the obvious faux pas of “forced equality” (this is equity, meaning equal outcomes which is truly a sickening concept) racial discrimination has been explicitly illegal in hiring practice for decades, and is a poor explanation for industry demographics. Are oil companies discriminating against women since you don’t see them in the fields?

Well, maybe I didn't read as carefully as I should. For starters, IMO requiring a minority is wrong. If there isn't a qualified minority then we will have no minority until one is qualified. But if only 20% of the board is minority it really wouldn't change the outcome that often. And I will admit that for leadership in the armed forces I would probably lean more towards the best vs the good enough.
A lot of the complaining about DEI pilot hiring is that they don't have as much experience, but there have been times before where a commercial and 250 hours would get you in at UAL as a white male, and right now all the legacies are hiring pilots with way less experience than a decade ago. If you aren't good enough you obviously don't belong in the cockpit regardless.

Drunk driving has been illegal for a while too....

I would guess that there are vastly more male applicants, just as there is vastly more female teachers. It is only discrimination if the ratio of qualified minority applicants is different from the ratio of hired minorities. And yes, it would be discrimination too if more minorities were hired. But I am not sure if that is always wrong, if it was the other way around for a long time. Affirmative action was made illegal even in California, so I understand my position isn't popular.

If you were to classify jobs as either more interpersonal and empathetic, or more technical and STEM, you would of course find more men in those tech fields. Women are generally more interested in people and men generally more interested in things.

The interesting thing is if you compare a bell curve distribution of men and a bell curve of women across these types of fields, they overlap significantly. This is why the fields that fall in between extremes are popular with both men and women. Things like sales, accounting, management, consulting are appealing to a bulk of both men and women. This is why DEI is easier to achieve and moderate in most fields, because it isn't really an issue. The hiring pools are diverse by nature.

It is at the extreme ends of the bell curves where you find the issues. Why are nurses and teachers and social workers and HR predominantly women? Sure there are male nurses and teachers, and many are competent and do well, but it's not something most men are into. The extreme end of the bell curve is where you find these careers that appeal almost exclusively to women.

The same is true on the other end. There are many STEM and technical fields that have competent women who do well... but they are the outliers on the extreme end of the female bell curve. It's not that women can't do the job, they just don't want to do it. The core skills don't appeal to the interests and goals they have, and given a choice Mathe majority want to do something else.

The DEI advocates always like to highlight fields and industries where there is an extreme imbalance and chalk it up immediately to bias or discrimination, but from a statistical standpoint there are clear reasons why people of various groups tend to be over or underrepresented and it's usually by choice.

In my experience I relayed, the only "required women and minority" was a qualified senior person of that ilk to be on each selection board. That had been a policy for at least the 90's forward. Consequently, if you had a senior level officer or enlisted member in your command of that ilk, they were often asked to be a part of the selection board process whereas most officers/enlisted would go their whole career without sitting as a member of a selection board. This actually led to many of these individuals being very familiar with the selection board process and able to pass that knowledge back to their squadon/shipmates. Otherwise, Navy selection boards were often seen as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

All female Navy flight crew crashed a plane off the end of the runway killing two a few days ago. I’m blaming a lack of diversity.

Should have had at least one dude. Look at history, dudes don't crash planes, especially if it's an all-dude flight crew.

There were no injuries much less fatalities, and it appears folks are confusing this with a different story regarding an all female crew. Your biases are showing.

https://theaviationist.com/2023/11/27/enough-with-the-all-female-crew-caused-the-p-8-crash-nonsense/

https://www.flightglobal.com/fixed-wing/us-navy-hopes-to-restore-crashed-hawaii-p-8-to-flight-status/155991.article

my bad, I guess I should have known all female crews were crashing all over the place!