The home departments conclusion was based on the faculty working with the individuals for five or six years while they took classes and seminars, did research, wrote papers, presented those papers, re-worked papers, wrote the dissertation, defended the dissertation, TA’d classes, taught classes, etc. etc. while training them to become a professor at a research university.
As for you impugning the home department, remember that they fully funded these three graduates to start out with, and were proud of their placements.
As for the hiring schools, after Larry Summers, you can bet they will not say “we hired these applicants because they are female/black!”. However, you cannot deny that universities consider race, gender, etc. when making hiring decisions much like they do when they decide which students to admit and who to give financial aid to. See below for Cornell advertising for a generic URM professor.
Also:
To be clear, I never said that any of these candidates were UNqualified. All three made it through a PhD program at a major university, which qualified them for any of the jobs they were offered.