I care deeply. With a 100 percent male workforce comes a 100 percent male mindset. Say I am creating a site for maternity clothes, I am not sure if I can turn a blind eye to the trade offs all the male engineer may make even though they have the best interests at heart. They may not be significant to the male engineer but it will very much be caught by a female engineer. Unless you are selling shaving kits or male grooming kits, your customers are gonna be woman and so that perspective is much more important than getting the best software engineer.
To reframe this on race, there's been a couple of (from an engineering perspective) gobsmacking demos of how non-diverse developers end up making something that just does not work for people who don't look like them.
The soap dispenser that doesn't recognize dark skin:
I can't find it now but there's another demo of the simple face detection algorithm (not recognition, just highlighting that "here is a face") simply not detecting a dark-skinned person til she lifts up a white mask to her face, and then it detects a "face" immediately.
Something as simple as soap dispenser not detecting dark skin, would that have made it out into production if they'd had a dark-skinned person on the team? Something as basic as, "Hey this doesn't work on Jim, maybe we should tweak the sensor a bit."
That's where some diversity matters, just so that your products work on everyone out there.
Diversity doesn't matter in practice if management doesn't want to spend the resources to engineer for diverse use cases. I've been over-ruled too many times when I've pushed for "fringe" use cases - including once with exactly your example of a product not working on Black people (different product, but same ethnicity-based issue). My team intentionally sought out (internal) diversity to test the prototype on. And guess what? When I said this was a big problem and we needed to fix it, I got over-ruled (by my non-White company president) because we were already late shipping the product. (Then product got canned for other reasons later - after I left the company shortly after this decision).
I'm not sure how to fix this broader problem - or what else I could/should have done there (other than leave for greener pastures)!
