Achieving Diversity — why being unbiased is not enough
Diversity is something we aspire to, but are we paying more than lip service to it? Are individual good intentions enough to achieve a diverse group setting, at work, socially or through the community?
There is a mountain of work that shows diversity provides so many wonderful benefits. A rich cultural tapestry provides better growth through society as ideas cross pollinated and morph into a new concept bigger and better and more impactful than the seperate parts.
An article in Aeon “Why hiring the ‘best’ people produces the least creative results” examines this from a work place perspective:
the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs.
Research also shows however that diversity does not happen of its own accord. It is something that has to be actively sought out and championed. Small biases from members of society magnify rapidly to produce a monoculture of sameness that is all too familiar in our organisations and friendship circles.
This was a concept explored by Schelling (1971) who suggested that
Minor variations in nonrandom preferences (or choices) can lead in the aggregate to distinct patterns of segregation in society… Individual behaviour based on quite minor differences in the particular combination of races or ethnic groups that individuals prefer culminates in aggregate results that are strikingly different
20 years later Clark reviews this work with more sophisticated modeling tools to arrive at a similar conclusion. Further work conducted by Martell starkly illustrates how small bias’s can rapidly impact employment prospects. Looking at the prevalence of women in senior positions a simulation showed how minor differences in ratings lead to reduce promotions which get magnified as you move up the organisational structure.
Even more dramatic is the finding that when sex differences explained but 1% of the variance, an estimate that might be dismissed as trivial, only 35% of the highest-level positions were filled by women. Thus, relatively small sex bias effects in performance ratings led to substantially lower promotion rates for women, resulting in proportionately fewer women than men at the top levels of the organization.
This could be equally true for any other ethnic culturally different group.
Gompers and Kovvali in a HBR article “The other diversity dividend” found that venture capital teams that lacked diversity produced measurably worse investment outcomes by as much as 26%. They write:
A willingness to openly recognize and tackle bias is at the heart of all our recommendations. When people choose to ignore bias or deny that it exists, they keep seeking out business partners, team members, and employees who share their traits, and they miss out on the quantifiable benefits of diversity.
Nicky Case has developed a wonderfully engaging explanation of how these initial biases can impact a groups diversity on his site the parable of the polygons
This interactive site allows you to model the impact of different bais on diversity.
Small individual bias can lead to large collective bias.
Equality is an unstable equilibrium. The smallest of bias can push a whole society past the tipping point.
One important point highlighted by the modelling is that once a system is already biased active measure to undo the bias — for instance quotas.
Nicky Case provides an excellent summary to move forward and improve diversity.
1. Small individual bias → Large collective bias.
When someone says a culture is shapist, they’re not saying the individuals in it are shapist. They’re not attacking you personally.
2. The past haunts the present.
Your bedroom floor doesn’t stop being dirty just coz you stopped dropping food all over the carpet. Creating equality is like staying clean: it takes work. And it’s always a work in progress.
3. Demand diversity near you.
If small biases created the mess we’re in, small anti-biases might fix it. Look around you. Your friends, your colleagues, that conference you’re attending. If you’re all triangles, you’re missing out on some amazing squares in your life — that’s unfair to everyone. Reach out, beyond your immediate neighbors.
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