The managerial case for diversity
This week I introduce my own argument for diversity. I call it the managerial case because I’ve never had a head for marketing.
The fundamental idea is that a lack of diversity is a symptom of other things going wrong in that company, and that if you meaningfully improve diversity, it’ll just so happen that you’ll increase the health of the whole organization. Thus, improving diversity should be a top goal of any organization that wants to be more efficient and effective.
To see this argument, we need to break down three things: Diversity as a symptom, what it means to meaningfully improve diversity, and what we mean by efficient and effective.
1. Diversity as a symptom of organizational health
A lack of diversity is a sign to me that something else is going wrong in an organization. As with, say, human health, the temptation is to focus on the symptom — a fever! a lack of women! But it’s the underlying causes — a bacterial infection! a promotion system that allows for personal networks to influence who is considered for top roles! — that need to be addressed in order to really resolve the issue at hand.*
There are two major phases where an organization can affect its diversity numbers (defined in terms of whatever metric(s) you deem most important): hiring vs. retention and promotion. Hiring diverse talent means rethinking your recruitment networks and how you evaluate people, which are serious challenges. Of course, one’s ability to recruit diverse talent also depends in part on who is in the firm, for network, evaluation, and role model reasons, among others. But the heart of organizational health comes into play once a person is hired.
Once a person is hired, they then enter an existing organization with a whole unique ecosystem of cultural and institutional rules (more on that soon) that they need to learn to navigate. The more different that person is from the majority — probably, on balance — the harder that’s going to be to understand in the first place. And, the more informal, stylized, exclusionary, ad hoc, and loose the culture and institutions are, the harder it’s going to be to find allies who can help you figure things out, and the more likely it is that you’ll get overlooked by the people making decisions anyway.
Thus, as you can see in my killer graphic above, a cursory way to get a sense of the health of your organization is to look at the gap between diversity in leadership and the rest of the organization (L-M). If they don’t match, you’re probably missing good talent and promoting the wrong talent. And you’re probably doing it because your institutions aren’t sufficient to keep biases from ruling the day.
2. What it means to meaningfully improve diversity
Humans are naturally horribly biased. We gravitate towards, spend more time with, and are more candid around people who look like us. We also tend to become more similar to those with whom we interact more. That’s one reason why we have different cultures.
We put rules in place in countries and companies to mitigate the effects of those biases. Examples of these rules include expanding voting rights to everybody regardless of race, or posting a non-discrimination policy somewhere on your website.
But despite the fact that these rules exist, biases still manage to creep in. For example, in the US turnout rates among voters of color are consistently lower than white voters, and barely any companies have leaders who are not mostly cisgender men. This means something isn’t working, and either the rules are insufficient to correct this imbalance, or we need to change something behaviorally among people given these rules.
At some point, you can change all the surface-level laws you want, but it’s the underlying institutions and behaviors that needs to change. In voting, one of the reasons we see lower turnout is because voting requires time and money, which often (but not always) is something many people of color have less of compared to white people in the US.
Another reason we see lower turnout is because of discriminatory behaviors at polling places on election day. Communities of color are more likely to get less and crappier voting equipment, and people of color are more likely to be asked for ID even when there is no voter ID law in that state. This means we’re more likely to see longer lines and more people getting turned away in areas with many POC. And, it turns out, if you have a bad experience voting one time, you’re less likely to vote again in a future election, which means every time all these things go wrong, we’re ruling out more and more VOC (voters of color? Can I say that?), perhaps for good.
Knowing this means that we now know that if we want to increase voter turnout, doing a whole bunch of “get out the vote” campaigns may be largely pointless in some areas. Instead, it’s about the slower, less sexy work of reducing economic inequality and making people who work at polls less racist — or change the rules there so that they can’t do things like ask for ID when they aren’t supposed to.
Meaningfully improving diversity in a company means doing the same work as we might do in a polling place — where are the spots where human biases are creeping in when it comes to everything from daily interactions through the most formal of promotions? The size of L-M, above, tells you a little bit about just how inefficient and inaccurate you are as a group.
3. The efficient organization
I call this argument for diversity the managerial case because I realized after a few years of doing diversity research that the main behavioral recommendations I was giving were the same ones that many other people out there are giving people just about how to be good managers and employees (e.g., be fair and nice to everyone). And, I realized that the institutional recommendations I was making were about improving the collective decision-making process (e.g., this is about making sure you’re finding the right people for the right roles).
More often than not, the results from whatever research I was doing about why there wasn’t more diversity had almost nothing to do with diversity directly. It had to do with inefficiencies, dysfunctionalities, redundancies, confusion, last-minute scrambling, and all the other things we all complain about in our place of work.
Diversity in this view is just one casualty of workplace dysfunctionality. Other symptoms of dysfunctionality include, say, a lack of profit, or the release of a product with flaws (like the MCAS system or any time a company issues a recall). These are concrete examples of systemic, organizational failings that we can measure, and we’re quick to ask, say, what’s going on in Boeing that they could allow this to happen?
The managerial case for diversity says let’s ask the same question of companies: If everyone at the top is white, male, cisgender, non-disabled, and Ivy-League-educated, then what’s going wrong inside the company that could allow this to happen?
I like this case also because it falls under what my undergraduate micro and environmental economics professor called a “no regrets” policy. Even if we don’t believe that climate change is real, we can all agree that putting in more energy efficient equipment in companies, at minimum, can reduce overhead costs. I encourage companies to think about diversity in the same way — rather than focusing on outputs (how many women?), what can you change in your company that might give rise to more diversity, but also will just make you a more efficient and effective group to begin with?
This means looking at behaviors and institutions inside a company to see what’s going on. And that’s the topic of next week’s article!
This is the fourth article in a ten-part series on social science and diversity. Read the others here:
- A new series about diversity and social science
- The importance of defining diversity (and how to do it!)
- A review of the two standard cases for diversity
* I am not a medical professional. If you have a fever, please stop reading this and instead head over to WebMD and convince yourself you have cancer until you actually speak to a medical professional.
