It's funny, one of the original reasons that organizations would strive for diversity was to bring different perspectives to bear on innovation and problem solving. Race, gender, geography, and socio-economic status were proxies for diversity of thought, because that's not something you can easily measure.

Somewhere along the way, diversity of thought got forgotten, and now organizations will gladly sacrifice diversity of thought. In fact, it often seems that most organizations have a strong preference for conformity of thought.

As far as I'm concerned, if you don't have diversity of ideas, then you don't actually have diversity, in any meaningful sense. If you're interested, the Heterodox Academy does some good work in this area.

On another note, good luck getting into PERC. I think that would be awesome. Not sure if you saw it, but I wrote about free market environmentalism and mentioned PERC in another article recently.