> If you live in a very culturally/racially/ethnically homogeneous area
What a crock. I don't mean to play identity politics but I can't imagine someone who isn't a white man saying this. I've never seen a tech team with a reasonable gender split, and I can assure you no one is living in a genderally homogenous area.
Lack of diversity is a humungous problem in western society, and while I agree the place to address that may not be a company trying to execute merit-based hiring, it's clear if an entire system outputs only one category of person as successful, that system has deep biases and would be ripe for improvement by including other categories of person.