Hi Henry. I'm glad to hear of your success in fielding and selecting female candidates without the need for quotas. This may not have been the case a decade or more ago when there were much fewer women in positions of leadership. Bias, however, can be quite unconscious, even if there is no intention to be biased - it's natural, we all have it in some way.

If I understand you correctly, the competence you typically look for is around the ability to create value (aka profit/growth), but I think if you examine assumptions around your definition of competence, there may even be bias hiding there. Do you value people who attend certain schools over others (from which there is more likely a less diverse pool of graduates)? Do you put less value on certain career paths which may indicate hardships or breaks from work for personal reasons? Would you consider that someone with a known disability may not be as competent as other people? Do you trust people more that you could sit down and have a beer with? Would you feel more familiarity with someone because they have similar traits or background to you? I'm not saying you may think like this, only just that these are examples of what could form unconscious bias.

Oddly enough, I was browsing through Medium yesterday and saw this article that describes research that shows how confidence can be mistaken for competence: https://medium.com/inc./confidence-often-wins-over-competence-in-job-interviews-new-stanford-study-shows-13dc212e29e8.