Regardless it took only a few years for what I heard to go from "we should use gender/race as a tie breaker" to "our next head of sales must be a woman", stated openly on a recorded all hands video call. And that's inevitable because the moment someone accepts the claim that there's a problem that must be solved, they lose the ability to push back on ever more extreme solutions. The only way out is to argue that there is in fact no problem to be solved and never was, which results in people being targeted and fired for -isms of whatever kind.
So in practice affirmative action is deeply unpopular and it's not due to people being idiots. It's because the "cost free" framing that proponents like to use is misleading. There is always a cost.
