You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective).
If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.
The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.
Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.
The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.
The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.
The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.
But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?
This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.
Equal outcomes for everybody.
This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
Eight test events in 10 minutes 20 seconds. All events must be passed. No breaks. Candidates wear 50 pounds of weight through the whole test. Plus an additional 25 pounds for the stair climb. The events are all firefighting-related.
Here's a woman firefighter passing this test.[2] With two minutes to spare.
LA City Fire is about 3% female.[3]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wh3EoE1yJnQ
And 10 minutes, how about they test them for 8 hours of that kind of work?
Who is going to last a whole shift or 36 straight hours of fighting Palisades fires?
\1 Is this a real problem in actual fire deployments or simply a made up bit of Fox News DEI outrage?
\2 Here in the Western Australian rural bush fire service 100lb women and people in wheelchairs are valuable members that operate GIS terminals, coordinate aircraft, work as administrators and bookkeepers, etc.
It is verifiable fact that the LAFD has lowered the strength requirements considerable in order to allow for smaller people. And with the current fires, there is a plenty of footage of small people not being able to do the heavy physical stuff.
And certainly women (and small men) can do many other useful things, but they people that operate GIS terminals would not be "firefighters" in the categorical sense even if they are valuable parts of the fire fighting team.
I'm a firefighter in NM. Your comments about firefighters are pathetic and ignorant.