What really makes a diverse company?

A friend of mine is looking to change jobs and she asked me what should have been a fairly simple question: “How do I know if a company will support marginalized people and empower me in supporting them?”

I’ve been working in the diversity field on and off since 2003 and I’ve been actively mentoring tech company leaders both in the US and internationally since 2016. I figured I’d have a simple response ready for my friend but it stumped me.

I posed this question on Twitter but, I realized afterward, I approached the problem too narrowly. Whether a company is currently succeeding at diversity is like measuring whether the company currently has revenue. It’s a snapshot of one moment — not a reflection of business fundamentals and future performance. A diverse employee demographic now doesn’t indicate future diversity — particularly if those with less power are in junior positions.

A better definition of diversity

I think we’re all tired of “diversity” as a shorthand for “hire more white women and Black people.” Particularly with non-American leaders I’ve needed a better, more universal model. Companies in Iceland shouldn’t expect to hire many black employees. Companies in South Africa should. The demographics inside your company’s walls should be roughly the same as the demographics outside of it. If that’s not the case, something’s fishy.

So let’s use that as a definition:

“Diversity is when the people who thrive in an organization have the same distribution of attributes as the people immediately adjacent to that organization, assuming equal distribution of interest”.

That’s a vague enough definition that most companies should be able to say they meet it. It’s a low low bar, especially with that last bit about interest. Yet, the published demographics of tech companies are nothing like the outer communities’ demographics.

What doesn’t work?

The question my friend asked is about business fundamentals. How does a company support marginalized people and support those who support marginalized people? And how do you evaluate the company from the outside?

There’s a lot of accepted conventional wisdom in diversity circles. You’ll here diversity leaders push unconscious bias training, manager education, hiring quotas-that-aren’t-quotas, etc. I’ve tried all of these and I thought they were effective at the time. But there’s some good research in this field and we’ve found that a lot of the popular approaches just don’t work. Some are even actively harmful, like mandatory diversity training (it creates antagonism to diversity).

So, before talking about what works, let’s talk about what we now know doesn’t work:

• Having a minority leader does not necessarily improve things for other minorities. It can even make things worse, because the problem no longer appears as severe.
• Asking the employees who are members of minority groups to address the problem means they struggle to succeed at their jobs. If the company rewarded diversity-seeking behavior it wouldn’t have diversity problems to begin with.
• Unconscious bias training doesn’t work. Manager training in general sees little return.
• Having a currently-diverse employee pool doesn’t mean those demographics will be the same in a year. It only takes a little bias to completely change the demographic. [credit: Penelope Hill]
• Teams have their own levels of safety and inclusion, so the personal testimony of one employee doesn’t predict the experience of new hires. Just because your friend feels a certain way at a company doesn’t mean anyone else will.

And, though I’m not aware of research on this topic, it sure seems like the presence of a Chief Diversity Officer does very little. Diversity is the product of fair decisions made in spite of unconscious biases. If the CEO of a company doesn’t create an environment where decisions are made fairly there’s no way a Chief Diversity Officer can fix that. The CDO role becomes a marketing gimmick, a smiling face that encourages new employees to hop into the meat grinder of white supremacy.

I suspect Chief Diversity Officers have short tenures for precisely this reason — it takes about a year for them to realize that unless they can veto the CEO’s decisions the existence of a CDO is net negative.

What does work?

I think of healthy organizations like noise-canceling headphones. The way a noise-canceling system works is it listens to ambient noise, measures it, and then emits a wave form that’s the inversion of the ambient noise. This inverted wave form silences the world outside the headphones, allowing us to hear music clearly.

The noise outside a company is the set of unconscious biases that we’ve developed as a society. And the music is the actual work product. To maximize the effectiveness of that work the company must create an inverted waveform to cancel biases. This promotes diversity along every axis and increases output.

The best way to accomplish this is actually pretty obvious: It’s making leaders with real power responsible for diversity. And for them to do it by identifying the ways that decisions could get compromised by unconscious biases, then to create policies that defend against those compromises.

I find it helpful to talk about each kind of bias in isolation. Each culture has a different set of biases so each organization needs to do its own work measuring them. But, broadly, most organizations need to address gender, age, ethnicity, religion, height, medical status, immigration status, and caregiver status.

When I counsel leaders on this I have them start with ‘height’ because it’s easiest: Tall men earn more money and — outside the NBA — there’s absolutely no reason for it. The reason height gives an advantage is because we’re more likely to reflexively defer to tall people, regardless of their competence.

The solution here is to create a structure — any structure — for how responsibilities are assigned to employees. If there is none then we’ll all subconsciously put the tall people in charge, most of whom are men. If we have literally any policy on who gets to take on new responsibility then we’ve started to implement organizational noise-canceling.

So how do we evaluate a company?

What, then, do I tell my friend who’s looking for a good company? I don’t know if there’s actual research into this but I suspect there are a few symptoms of a healthy, noise-canceling organization.

If a company is doing the work to make decisions fairly and give everybody an equal shot at success, they’re probably doing all of the following:

• Decisions are documented and published.
• Leadership — especially at the C-level — publishes all meeting notes and documents (redacting sensitive material) so employees can gain leverage and access directly, not through relationships.
• The CEO believes it is their job to create an environment where people have fair access to opportunities.
• The CEO believes it’s core to every person’s job to ensure their part of the organization mitigates biases — not an ‘extracurricular’ activity.
• There’s a structured way for people to gain more power, and with power comes specific responsibility.
• The company has an ongoing conversation about diversity and inclusion, at the same level that it has an ongoing conversation about product health.
• Employees who are not members of (many) minority groups are expected to shoulder the burden of diversity and inclusion work. In Silicon Valley, this means White and Asian men should be evaluated in part by their contributions to diversity-supporting work.

Given the choice between an all-white-male leadership team that did this work, and a more diverse leadership team that didn’t — I’d pick the white men. Because organizations evolve according to the policies and incentive structures in place, not just the theoretical values. If a company performs introspection of its systems of power and opportunity then, no matter what the team looks like right now, it might become the best kind of company: One where the work itself is the hardest part of working there.