It is the first teo for sure, maybe the third.

We have the inertia of past directors being prinarily men. That means to pool of established directors that are likely to be picked for a bigger budget movie that will receive a ton of advertising will be men.

Second, even with DEI the culture of most cultures simply defers to tall men for the most part, even when it is subconcious. So a pitch for a movie will just end up leaning towards men on top of the ratio of available directors because the people funding movies are likely older men who have concious or inconcious biases.

I'm sure most people pay little attention to the director outside of well known names. The well known names tend to be men, because they have probably been making movies for a couple decades in the current environment. I'm sure there is a mix of people who are interested or turned away from a film if a woman is directing, but I have no idea how much of it is because it is a woman by iteself or because of being marketed as being directed by a woman. Barbie was a massive success, so it isn't like being directed by a woman is a complete dealbreaker, but while big budget action movies that dominate the box office are directed by men who have become houshold names the ratio will stay skewed.

Even if society leaned hard into DEI it woukd take decades to reach any semblance of balance.

Perhaps "like-minded" is the wrong term, here. The idea is to find people who are just looking for a way to say "do I see myself working with the people on this team?". If you go through the questionnaire, you will see people also should answer "what answers are also acceptable" and "how important their answer is to you".

The questions are not about checking people's backgrounds or rooted in any type of personal topics that could lead to discrimination. They are asking things like "what do you think of scrum/agile" or "do you think that it's okay for companies to use data on the web for AI, if this means more free services for people?".

You should hire people based on their ability to perform the job, and nothing else.

That's a given. But unless we have perfect equilibrium between supply and demand for labor, there is always one side that will have a number of options (candidates in the down-market, opportunities in a growing cycle) and they will always be asking themselves "of all these acceptable options, which would fit best?". No one will just say "good, we have 20 qualified candidates coming up, so let's throw a dart and hire whoever it lands on".