Why Companies are Afraid of Diversity Data and What to Do About It

What you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

Let that sink in. What you can’t measure, you can’t improve. I feel like this is the unwritten rule when it comes to business. This is why every department is inundated with metrics and KPIs. Sales teams have call quotas and revenue targets. Customer Service has NPS scores and time spent per call. I’m sure even Facilities has some type of targets when it comes to recyclables or the time it takes to fix issues.

Everyone wants a way to measure their success — a tangible goal to strive for as well as something concrete to show for their hard work…

Except when it comes to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, it seems.

When I hear a company is starting a DEI program, I’m optimistically cautious. My first questions are often who’s leading it and what are their goals? You can call it the Product Manager in me, but if you don’t have goals or a target outcome, why are you doing it? Without goals, these initiatives are bound to fail.

These are the excuses I’ve heard from leaders when it comes to tracking and sharing data from their DEI programs:

• “This is an ongoing initiative. We are just trying to make progress.”
• “Our company is committed, but this is a hard thing to quantify.”
• “We are just at the beginning stages. We know we want to make progress, but we just don’t know what it is.”
• “We don’t want to put hard numbers on this because it could come off as a quota.”

Can you imagine a CEO saying to their board, “Revenue is an ongoing initiative and we’re just trying to make money. But we can’t give you a target for next year”? Can you imagine hearing, “We’re at the beginning stages of acquiring customers and we know we want to get more, but we don’t know a good number, but please trust us and give us $5 million dollars for our Series A round”? For some reason, leaders are perfectly comfortable using metrics to make sure their business stays on track. However, they seem wary of using the same structure on an issue that clearly needs focused attention, all while ensuring us that this is something they want to fix — — we can dig into the ‘wanting to fix’ myth in another article.

Why the fear?

So, I started to ask myself, why are people afraid of numbers? Recently, a few articles have quoted some companies who say their diversity numbers are trade secrets and therefore can’t be shared publicly — as if sharing the number of women of color in Marketing is the same as revealing what’s in the 12 seasonings and spices of KFC chicken! In any case, many have concluded that it’s just too embarrassing to share these numbers, particularly in light of how much money companies have spent trying to solve the problem.

The fear of embarrassment could be why some companies are afraid to track and share diversity data, but I think it goes beyond that. Perhaps they’re afraid that once there are hard numbers, then they will have to take concrete and difficult action toward solving the problem.

Maybe it’s because they will feel personally responsible because their efforts (or lack thereof) have caused their company to fall short. Maybe it’s because they’re afraid of what others will think about them more than they care about the actual diversity issues themselves. (Someone told me once that they were afraid to deny my DEI request because they thought I would call them racist. True story.)

Maybe it’s because these numbers are actually a reflection of people in a way that most other metrics are not. (I say most because HR has many metrics they track such as attrition and turnover, etc. While these track individuals, it’s clearly less emotionally-tinged data.)

Understanding motivations are important, because the emotions and feelings these numbers invoke need to be addressed to achieve sustainable progress on DEI initiatives. But the truth is that these motivations don’t matter BECAUSE DEI initiatives MUST move forward. Point. Blank. Period.

We have to be aware of their motivations, but not handicapped by them. Women’s suffrage didn’t just happen because they addressed all the fears and concerns of men and all the powerful men in the world woke up one morning thinking, you know what, these women being able to vote thing actually doesn’t make me less of man, let’s give these ladies some equality! Women fought for their rights every step of the way without placating the powers that be, because it’s what needed to happen.

Dropkick the fear

My plea to you is to stop making this harder than it needs to be. If you and your company are truly committed to increasing diversity in your organization, treat it like every other metric that you track. Embrace the fact that your transparency and genuine efforts will help more than it will hurt. (After all, letting the public or press discover you are hiding this information is far worse than proactively sharing where you are falling short!)

Give yourself a reasonable goal based on the number of hires you plan for that year and start tracking data.

You need to track:

1. Where your applicants come from and their demographics.
2. The applicants your recruiters choose for phone screens, and their demographics.
3. Who gets invited to each step of your hiring process, and their demographics.
4. Who is referring candidates, and the demographics of both the referrer and the applicant.
5. And of course, candidates receiving offers, AND THEIR DEMOGRAPHICS.

But what about…

Let me address the last hold out that I hear from most people: That it’s against the law to require demographic information during the hiring process.

What the actual law says is that certain demographic groups cannot be discriminated against during hiring. There’s nothing illegal about asking (without requiring) that information and tracking it separately from actual applications. (Normal disclaimer, I’m not a lawyer so I’m not giving any legal advice.)

For example : Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

Title VII prohibits employers from discriminating against employees on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, or gender in all aspects of employment — from recruitment through termination.

Once that myth is busted, the last little straggler is ‘Well people aren’t going to want to give us their information’. Again, messaging and transparency is key. Explain that you are using this data to track the candidates that are in your hiring program so that you can create a process that is inclusive for all, AND that this data is kept separately from their application and has no bearing whatsoever on their candidacy. This way, candidates will be much more likely to give you that information. And even if they STILL choose not to give it to you, you still have data from the other candidates that didn’t opt out. That’s more data than you have now!

The point of collecting data is not to show perfection or that you ‘solved the problem’ in one fell swoop. Data gives you a clear roadmap of issues to solve. It helps you take a huge, amorphous and emotionally charged cloud of chaos and break it down to smaller more focused pieces that you can attack systematically. Data is there to help you succeed.

So again, say it with me. What you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

Let’s start making improvements.