I don’t deny that this exists, but you’re off on your reasoning about why. This kind of skepticism exists not because people inherently assume white men to be capable, it exists as a predictable reaction to affirmative action and diversity emphasis in hiring practices. The moment you begin elevating the importance of non-merit based factors in hiring, the moment you begin saying things like “a more diverse team makes us more well rounded and helps us to deliver a better product/service”, is the moment you introduce doubt about why someone was hired, whether that doubt is legitimate or not.
Think about it, if merit was the only criteria considered for a job opening, then we would expect to look at someone offered the job as qualified. When applicants have consideration shown them due to non-merit based factors, when there is any departure from a purely merit based approach, you will reliably see a backlash against this as a possible “lowering the bar”. That obviously leads to questions about the hiring of people that may have had such consideration given them when the majority of other candidates did not. To the extent that white males’ qualifications are not questioned, that’s because everyone intuitively knows that he had no diversity criteria favoring him in his application, so what else would they attribute his job to? If one group of people can only be hired based on merit, but other groups can be hired based on merit and a slew of other factors, then reliably there will be questions about which was more important in hiring them.
To my mind, the solution is clear. Hiring should be about who is the best person for the job, regardless of any immutable characteristics like race or gender. I have no reason to believe that women or those of any non white male persuasion should be any less capable of a tech job, so I have no reason to believe that purely merit based hiring should be discriminatory. It seems like the bigotry of low expectations to think that any minority group should inherently fare worse in a head to head merit competition.
If there are pipeline issues as you suggest that prevent women or minorities from pursuing tech in the first place, then that’s a separate conversation, one that should focus any efforts on reducing such pressures rather than on expecting companies to institute discriminatory hiring practices to compensate.
