You raise a interesting point about perception vs. reality. I've spent most of my adult life working for large companies that are the type that are absolutely all in on what is now called DEI. Whenever someone would grumble about how it's hard for a white male the response would inevitably be "look around you and see all the white men working here at all levels of the company. Obviously your concerns are invalid." I believe this is essentially what you're saying too.

However, at the same companies all of the following have also happened:

- There was a manager meeting where they gave a lengthy talk about how important diversity was. They talked about how it definitely wasn't about gender or skin color, but that it meant different life experiences, educational backgrounds, perspectives, etc. Then they said "and I'm looking around here and can see there's no diversity here." Kind of undermined that earlier speech and suggested that it really was about superficial attributes, didn't it?
- Multiple times I've been a hiring manager for a position and been told that I can pick anyone I want "as long as it isn't a white male."
- In a departmental all-hands an executive took the stage to announce that they were undertaking a job search for a VP+. They said that it would be a thorough search but committed to us that the eventual hire would be a woman of color. How is that not a "need not apply" flashing neon sign?
- In a company all-hands we were introduced to our new EMEA executive team. After 15-20 minutes of introducing these people our COO took the stage and immediately said "I recognize that these are all white men and I want to apologize. We promise we'll do better next time."

To be fair, I'll bet in almost all these situations the company legal team cornered these people and told them their comments were not okay. But, in employee survey after employee survey these companies kept getting low scores for questions like "anyone can succeed at company Y without regard for their race or other attributes." And in response they doubled down harder and harder on the type of messaging I'm pointing out to try to fix it.

So, based on my life experience I'll suggest that more than one thing can be true at once. The reality apparently was that there was opportunity for these people, but it's also pretty realistic for them to believe that those opportunities would only be as a last choice in conflict with that reality. And why would you want to work in a culture where you worry about lack of opportunity due to very direct statements from leadership supporting that idea?

As to the question of whether someone who's at the top of the company should be bothered by "lack of opportunity" even though they've already arrived, I can see that too. I'd question whether I'm "pulling the ladder up behind me" for anyone who has the same background as me.

For the record, I've always left companies when this type of overt messaging manifests in the culture. It's gross, and it also frankly makes me concerned that "non-performance-related things" are becoming the most important thing at the company. My $0.02.