California’s law mandating diversity quotas for corporate boards suffered a loss in court last week, but the issue is far from over. Today’s renewed emphasis on quotas is an outgrowth of progressives’ obsession with equity — and it discloses the lengths they’ll go to impose their view on others.

The 2020 law struck down by a state judge required publicly traded corporations headquartered in California to have persons from “underrepresented communities” on their boards of directors or face fines. According to the law, a person from an “underrepresented community” is anyone who self-identifies as a minority based on race or LGBTQ status.

California passed a similar law in 2018 requiring publicly traded corporations based in the state to include women on their boards of directors. Washington, Oregon, and Maryland copied California soon after. The Wall Street Journal identified a troubling pattern: “One-party Democratic states are increasingly resorting to government coercion to impose their social values.”

State governments are not alone in their willingness to mandate such social values as diversity, intersectionality, and antiracism. The Securities and Exchange Commission has approved a Nasdaq rule requiring companies to meet certain gender and racial diversity targets for board members, or justify in writing why they haven’t.

Why the reliance on government coercion rather than persuasion? Economist Thomas Sowell puts his finger on it: One side has process goals while the other has outcome goals. Conservatives care that the process of becoming a board member is fair and that candidates are not discriminated against because they are minorities or women.

Progressives, on the other hand, want women and minorities to be board members proportionate to their population share, process and personal decisions be damned.

The progressive view requires minimal effort and ignores the true complexities of the issue. It implies that any disparity is itself evidence of discrimination. “[A]ll human groups are equal,” Ibram X. Kendi affirms, emphasis added. Therefore, the only explanation for divergent outcomes is racism or sexism.

Not so fast, Mr. Sowell has written, not even people “born to the same parents and raised under the same roof” have equality of outcome. “Why should equality of outcomes be expected — or assumed — when conditions are not nearly so comparable?” Individuals’ choices and personal preferences, it seems, have no place in the antiracist explanation of disparities.

Underrepresented groups, moreover, are infinite. Unattractive people were not included in California’s diversity quota, despite studies — seriously — showing they’re disadvantaged in numerous ways compared to attractive people. Short people were not included either. Nor were children from single-parent homes.

A category like race is not a discrete characteristic, which creates real implementation problems and perverse incentives. Because race is a spectrum, people may choose the identity most beneficial to them. Senator Warren, say, chose for decades to be identified as Native American. Quotas invite gaming the system.

The worldview underpinning diversity quotas also leads to other counterproductive policies. Last month, California became the only state in the country to have zero public universities accepting standardized test scores in admissions.

Why? Because Black students — on average — tend to score lower than white students. There’s a disparity, and therefore the test is discriminatory. In the words of Congressman Jamaal Bowman, a New York Democrat: “Standardized testing is a pillar of systemic racism.”

Never mind that the University of California’s own study found that test scores “are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines, even after controlling for high school grades,” and that 47 percent of students admitted on the basis of their SAT scores “were low-income or first generation students … [who] would not have been guaranteed admission on the basis of their grades alone.”

Progressives’ solution to the disparity in test scores does more harm than good. Without some objective measurement, college admissions offices must rely on less reliable indicators. One study found that physical attractiveness “has a positive and statistically significant impact on GPA for female students.” A measure — grade point average —  that can be influenced by one’s appearance has become the primary method of evaluating prospective students.

The American Enterprise Institute’s Frederick Hess has pointed out that “college admissions gamesmanship tends to favor privileged applicants, who might have resources, connections, college-educated parents, and pricey consultants at their disposal.”

An ideology that elevates diversity as the highest good and that values outcomes over process has proved in the past to be flawed and indefensible. The future for such an ideology is no brighter.