Three Types of Diversity
I’ve talked a big game about the importance of defining diversity, but I haven’t actually done it yet. This changes today!
Hi! I just finished speaking in a two-day training that covered the social science behind a lot of the more well-known terms surrounding diversity, and I was reminded of how important it is to have a common frame of reference when collectively studying something. Plus, every single buzzword around diversity both comes from a lot of social science and still could benefit from a lot of social science work, so for the next few articles I’m going to focus on unpacking some more of these.
(Plus, last weekend my father asked me if I am writing in this series about the things I speak about in my trainings, and actually the answer is no, not yet. I’ve more been expounding on how I’ve been thinking about how all this fits into the background, rather than being specific about what I actually think some of the moving parts might be.)
While I fear the social scientists reading this series will now think I’m being incredibly vague, and the people who spend a lot of time thinking about diversity will think I’m missing many nuances and contexts, I’m going to practice what I expound on and offer one framework for how I think about diversity from which we can all build and do our scientific measuring and researching. (And, importantly, we can interrogate and challenge these theoretical categories, because that’s also important for progress in our understanding.
When we think about diversity, the two most common categories discussed are what we call identity diversity and cognitive diversity. My friend and colleague Vladimira Briestenska deserves the credit for alerting me to a third category of neurodiversity. These are certainly not the only categories out there, nor are they necessarily the “right” divisions along which to divide how we might think about differences between people, but I have found them to be robust, and more importantly, useful. Because I increasingly suspect I am a visual learner, here’s a map of it that I made myself.
Identity diversity refers to most of the categories we think about when we think about diversity — gender identity, race, age, sexual orientation, etc. As a colleague of mine put it recently, it’s mostly things you can’t choose. It’s also often (but not always) things that others perceive about you — or assume about you — based on how you look. This can make identity diversity frustrating because people see you and assume things about you. Or they don’t see something (like your family or families’ income growing up) and make assumptions about you. Tons and tons of research has been done in the social sciences about the behaviors, expectations, and socialized assumptions we carry and perform about these dimensions, and their consequences.
Cognitive diversity is the diversity of thought that many in the business world are obsessed with. Of course, this occupies a lot of our hero Scott Page’s work, as he showed mathematically cognitively diverse teams can outperform homogeneous teams, even of experts. Scott talks about it as models, which I find useful and will talk about in more detail later. But you can also think about cognitive diversity as any kind of thinking styles, problem-solving skills, interests, values, beliefs, personalities, work styles, or even tolerance for risk or uncertainty.
I gave a talk on cognitive diversity in London two weeks ago where we spent three whole hours talking just about the many ways you might measure and then meaningfully engage cognitive diversity. It’s a massive subject, and an especially interesting area of research here is once you’ve got cognitive diversity in a room, what are the best aggregation methods to sort through and decide on the “best” answer or process? This is part inclusion in a traditional diversity sense, and part something called information aggregation, which is what any political scientist is effectively studying when they study how governments make decisions. And, it’s studied by a very cool group at the Santa Fe Institute, among other places.
Finally, neurodiversity is an area I know less about, but am excited to see included in this area. This is the idea that neurological differences between humans are not disabilities to be overcome or corrected for but, rather, are part of the natural, or “normal” (insofar as that exists) variation in humans. We’ve seen that lots of traits that certainly can pose difficulties for many of us, like being on the autism spectrum, ADHD, OCD, anxiety, dyslexia, and so on, can also be sources of unique, powerful, and important viewpoints, working styles, and perspectives. It so happens that my father Robert Rooy recently won a Peabody award for his documentary in partnership with a young man with autism, and I highly recommend it.
Now, one tricky thing with creating these categories, is people can hide behind them. I’ve written before in this series how companies frequently defend a lack of diversity on identity by pointing to cognitive diversity. I believe that meaningful diversity — true differences that we want to include, understand, and celebrate — intersect on all three of these dimensions, at minimum. Here is some more beautiful artwork.
Importantly, I also want to stress that in social science we create definitions and conceptualizations in order to gain clarity on something. But not to declare a final word on anything. I think these categories are the “right” level of detailed without too granular for my purposes, but the definition that’s right for you and your organization might just have two categories, or one, or twenty. (See this article for more on how to find the right definition for you.)
I also want to emphasize that there is obvious overlap and grey areas at the boundaries of these categories. (They also raise deep questions about whether we ever actually choose anything or are just a product of our circumstances and wiring, but that’s a conversation for my therapist(s) and me. And you, if you want to email me!) Conceptually, it doesn’t really matter whether something like, say, attention span, is from neurological diversity or cognitive diversity. It matters more that we use this framework to clarify what we care about and why, and then decide from there how we want to measure it.
Goodness, I keep thinking these will be easy, and they are not. I also can’t decide if this is helpful or patronizing. To quote my dentist once, “Either way, it happened.” (My dentist is hilarious.)
This article is the seventh in a ten-part series on social science and diversity. Read the others here:
