Absolutely. Pichai had an opportunity to make Google stand out of the current insane PC mindset, as perhaps the Google of 15 years ago would, and instead chose to collaborate with the orthodoxy. So much for using data to evaluate ideas. What a disgraceful age we live in.
Who's to say Pichai hasn't used data? I think you may be presuming too much.
If one thing is true, there's plenty of data to demonstrate non-merit based discrimination. For example, studies that send out the same resume with different names is a common source of data: http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2014/why-does-john-get-stem-...
If you think discrimination only affects women and POCs, you'll be delighted to learn that from second tier law schools that signaled middle class were overwhelmingly the least likely to get called. Being a middle class women yielded 7x better chances and being a wealthy male yielded 13x better chances.
Ironically, being wealthy as a woman put you as a disadvantage.
This type of discrimination is real because our brains don't like doing rigorous evaluation. To save energy, we'll substitute in some heuristic and tell ourselves we rigorously evaluated a person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribute_substitution
Here's the point. Discrimination is real and it costs businesses money. It's like Moneyball. You can be like the Yankees and overpay for players that fit superficial molds, or you could actually be methodical like the 2002 Athletics and hire undervalued players their competitors discounted.
There are real economic incentives to focusing on diversity, especially if you can demonstrate your employees are passing on qualified people for superficial reasons (right school, hobbies, similar to me, culture fit, etc.)
The company that can successfully exploit an industry's hiring bias by targeting discounted groups and evaluating candidates rigorously will have the pick of the litter.
