Well, DEI must be a good thing, since it seems to be triggering a certain segment of the American population:
In general, I’d say that this is a larger debate than I have the time to meaningfully contribute to. I suspect that there is value in diversity and, in an ideal world, that should reveal itself under a meritocratic system and solve for itself. Since we don’t live in an ideal world, how much to force the matter is an interesting question that really comes down to the scientific process and deep analysis. In an ideal world, that will get us to where we want to be. But, since we live in reality, many tests are liable to be flawed and much analysis is likely to be questionable.
All I can do is comment on some of the likely flaws:
As best I can see, they’ve collected a series of correlative studies. Correlation does not equal causation.
Let’s say that I’m a very successful company with a wide profit margin. I could take piles of cash out into the backyard, every day, and light them on fire and still have more money than I need. Maybe I get some tax breaks, some ins with the government, some good press, etc. for hiring up some skirts, some ethnic minorities, etc. I go ahead and do so, since I have the luxury for it, and now I’m part of a statistic showing that diversity = profit. But really, the lesson was that high profits = the freedom to mess around.
Or, let’s say that I’m a boss who is very dynamic, creative, etc. As someone who likes to try new ideas, I’m also a person who likes a diversity of ideas and experiences around me. I build up a diverse and highly successful company. While it may be true that the diversity lead to financial success, that’s a side effect of the management style and outlook of the business leader. Forcing some racist, sexist guy to hire a bunch of minorities isn’t necessarily going to lead to a positive effect. They’ll be sidelined and simply eat into the budget. For that business owner, the business will be harmed by diversity since it’s not going to be incorporated into the culture of the company.
We can also imagine that a business owner likes a diversity of ideas and experiences, and became successful by carefully collecting, growing, pruning, and resourcing those ideas. When he steps down and someone new inherits this business, will that person have the same accumen? Let’s say that they viewed it as being innately good to do more, diverse, unrelated things. Maybe they start letting their artists slip gay romance themes into their entertainment products for small children, and end up alienating vast percentages of the marketplace who simply aren’t as open minded. The luxury to experiment and push the boundaries of what customers want might end up leading to a slowing of growth and a loss of customers. You need someone at the helm who knows how to balance all of this. Minus that person, the push to diversify just leads to business losses.
Without seeing the actual, underlying research, it’s hard to say much for sure but I feel like there’s a lot of room for p-hacking, cherry-picking, and using misleading definitions to allow for a particular outcome.
Let’s say that I have an all-white-all-male team and a second team that is more diverse. I give both teams a seminar about the value of getting ideas from people of different perspectives and life experiences, and show them research like the previous saying that it will make them more money. Following the presentation, I quiz them, “Do you feel like you will do better in the future now than before you attended this seminar?” The second team is going to give higher reviews than the first. Based on the results of the quiz, I can issue a research paper titled, “Teams with a diverse workforce more optimistic about their future.”
It’s not a good methodology and the takeaway that the author gives us isn’t necessarily what a more reasonable person would take from it, once they understand what exactly was done.
I could comment, similarly, on the rest of the articles.
It’s not impossible that there’s some good and meaningful research out there. But you’d really need someone very skeptical and discerning to dive through it to try and find something that actually showed causation, and also showed a useful methodology for government policy that achieved a good result, indiscriminate of the culture and leadership of any particular company.
High level summaries that don’t walk through the details of what they did, or which merely show correlation, simply aren’t good indicators of what the reality is, nor of how best to act to achieve the best outcome.
From the article,
Another mused: “They used to be Lyndon B. Johnson with the slurs straight to ya face. Now, they hide behind terms they don’t even know.”
Baltimore bridge’s collapse is the target of anti-DEI rhetoric
The ravings of racist lunatics should not be an obstacle to a rational discussion of DEI policies, including their potential downsides.
Exactly. Companies that embrace equity and inclusion are likely to have enlightened policies in many other areas affecting company leadership, and thus to have bright and motivated employees. The companies’ successes are not due to DEI, but rather, DEI is one of the consequences of competent management. And I can pretty much guarantee that those are the kinds of companies that hire based on skill and fit within the organizational culture, not on criteria meant to fulfill DEI quotas.
Not really, that was mostly based on an opinion about what the evidence shows, not the actual research.
Indeed.
The point is that most of the research does point also about the issues of causality, but that is why more research was done.
Following the links in the research already posted, and not just a gut feeling:
Diversity is not only about bringing different perspectives to the table. Simply adding social diversity to a group makes people believe that differences of perspective might exist among them, and that belief makes people change their behavior.
Members of a homogeneous group rest somewhat assured that they will agree with one another, understand one another’s perspectives and beliefs, and be able to easily come to a consensus. But when members of a group notice that they are socially different from one another, they change their expectations. They anticipate differences of opinion and perspective. They assume they will need to work harder to come to a consensus. This logic helps to explain both the upside and the downside of social diversity: people work harder in diverse environments both cognitively and socially. They might not like it, but the hard work can lead to better outcomes.
In a 2006 study of jury decision-making, social psychologist Samuel Sommers of Tufts University found that racially diverse groups exchanged a wider range of information during deliberation about a sexual assault case than all-white groups did. In collaboration with judges and jury administrators in a Michigan courtroom, Sommers conducted mock jury trials with a group of real selected jurors. Although the participants knew the mock jury was a court-sponsored experiment, they did not know that the true purpose of the research was to study the impact of racial diversity on jury decision-making.
Sommers composed the six-person juries with either all white jurors or four white and two Black jurors. As you might expect, the diverse juries were better at considering case facts, made fewer errors recalling relevant information and displayed a greater openness to discussing the role of race in the case. These improvements did not necessarily happen because the Black jurors brought new information to the group—they happened because white jurors changed their behavior in the presence of the Black jurors. In the presence of diversity, they were more diligent and open-minded.
GROUP EXERCISE
Consider the following scenario: You are writing up a section of a paper for presentation at an upcoming conference. You are anticipating some disagreement and potential difficulty communicating because your collaborator is American and you are Chinese. Because of one social distinction, you may focus on other differences between yourself and that person, such as their culture, upbringing and experiences—differences that you would not expect from another Chinese collaborator. How do you prepare for the meeting? In all likelihood, you will work harder on explaining your rationale and anticipating alternatives than you would have otherwise.This is how diversity works: by promoting hard work and creativity; by encouraging the consideration of alternatives even before any interpersonal interaction takes place. The pain associated with diversity can be thought of as the pain of exercise. You have to push yourself to grow your muscles. The pain, as the old saw goes, produces the gain. In just the same way, we need diversity—in teams, organizations and society as a whole—if we are to change, grow and innovate.
As companies have increased their focus on gender diversity, has it made a difference for their bottom lines?
Morgan Stanley Research analysts set out to answer that question more than a decade ago by scoring companies based on gender diversity at all levels — board members, executives, managers and employees — and then comparing those scores against share-price performance. The most recent analysis proves again that gender diversity can drive results.
Based on an examination of 1,875 firms on the MSCI World Index, those with greater gender diversity— and therefore a higher Holistic Equal Representation Score (HERS)— outperformed less gender-diverse firms (those with lower HERS rankings) by 1.6% in 2022, in line with 2021 performance and the pre-COVID long-term average.
If the reason is really due to race or sex, not necessary for job performance, isn’t that illegal?
EEOC (U.S.):
It is illegal for an employer to make decisions about job assignments and promotions based on an employee’s race, color, religion, sex (including gender identity, sexual orientation, and pregnancy), national origin, age (40 or older), disability or genetic information. For example, an employer may not give preference to employees of a certain race when making shift assignments and may not segregate employees of a particular national origin from other employees or from customers.
~Max
So you’re dismissing out of hand my assertion that …
Companies that embrace equity and inclusion are likely to have enlightened policies in many other areas affecting company leadership, and thus to have bright and motivated employees. The companies’ successes are not due to DEI, but rather, DEI is one of the consequences of competent management.
And you’re dismissing it in favour of an old SciAm article written by someone dedicated to the promotion of diversity – not a bad thing, to be sure, but not an unbiased position. It’s frankly an assessment by someone with an axe to grind.
I once had the pleasure of working for a large multinational corporation with truly enlightened management. Among other things, there was an extraordinary degree of employee empowerment: within the reasonable limits of your job description you were basically entitled to pursue your interests wherever you wanted as long as it had some potential benefit to the company. They were extraordinarily successful and most employees were deeply committed to the company and its vision. The employee base was about as diverse as the general population, and probably more than most typical corporations, but I never heard a damn thing about anything like “diversity”, “DEI”, or “affirmative action” as corporate policy. This is the factual basis and lived experience for my claim that DEI is a result, and not a cause, of enlightened management.
Yes, it’s illegal, and should be. But … it can be very difficult to prove except in really blatant circumstances. If it’s just a matter of hiring WG instead of MP, it’s easy to point to qualifications on WG’s resume that appear to make him more suitable, even if it’s total bullshit.
Does not work that way, remember that you claimed that what I reported was false, right out of hand. In this case, what you claim was not dismissed, it is more complicated than a simple dismissal. The point was that you were following what the other poster said, with no criticism whatsoever about how he was the one dismissing the evidence.
It has to be noted, like others that want to dismiss EDI, your reply omitted the issues women have too, as I noted before, the reason why that is dismissed is that it show how EDI is not dealing with imaginary things, the experience of women shows evidence that EDI is not wholly related to race, and because what women deal with is important, a lot of effort is made to ignore it in discussions about EDI.
IOWs, when you talk like you will dismiss it because you never heard of it, that is not a good argument, it is really embracing an argument by ignorance.
I agree with this. Companies whose cultures are so fucked up that an outside consultant or new board member has to advise them to begin adopting DEI or ESG as these are the things that will limit their risk to litigation going forward, are probably just doing it to cover their asses and it’s not really part of their culture so it won’t really be effective in the long run.
Companies that have strong cultures (i.e. enlightened management, as described by @wolfpup) probably don’t need to institute such programs as they have always run their businesses these ways without the labels.
And similarly in a firm where MP’s are unrepresented in management, a WG complaining of discrimination because a similarly qualified MP got promoted instead of him is going to have a hard case to make.
Of course that won’t prevent him from bitching to his facebook friends about the evils of DEI.
As @Odesio reports that is a big misconception.
Probably, but this implies that there should be no way to train others on what should be taught to other corporations that have issues. In absolute terms no less. It would be like a corporation that figures out how to make a hybrid work environment work successfully, and it should be banned to teach others about how it was done.
No, the problem arises with social engineering schemes that have either explicitly mandated or implied quotas that give preferential treatment to straight cis white men. The DEI stuff is just trying to fix that root cause.
Just for fun, here’s Charlamagne Tha God’s take on DEI from last night’s Daily Show.
There are so many employers in the United States in varied industries that it’s sometimes difficult to talk in generalities. My company might handle their DEI initiatives differently from Salesforce or Unilver (the owner of Vaseline). Charlamange makes several valid points, the big one for me is a lot of companies are just checking a box when it comes to DEI and using it as a marketing tool. And people tend to see through that kind of bullshit pretty quickly. Seriously, Kraft-Heize, did your marketing team really think calling diversity an essential ingredient for deliciousness sounded good? Mmmmm…you can really taste the diversity in this ketchup.
As odd as this might sound for someone in HR, I haven’t been subjected to a lot of sensitivity/diversity training. I’ve had courses on out to communicate and handling employee relations issues, those of you in corporate might be familiar with Crucial Conversations, but no courses on celebrating diversity or something like that. When we make our employees take courses on harassment it’s short and sweet. We basically just define what harassment is, tell them not to do it on pain of possibly losing their jobs, and tell them where they can report it.
If a company’s DEI initiatives aren’t actually addressing identified problems, then it’s going to fail. It can’t just be a box for management to check so they can feel good about themselves.
Yeah, lots of good things aren’t all that good, when you don’t actually do them.
In related news:
And, nice racket for some companies, they get to use the fig leaf, and they will not use it in its normal business environment. One gets the impression though that it is when companies become responsible and do use it properly in their business environment that then the offenderati comes and screams that this should be banned.
That is a massive leap from my comment. Where did I say that good companies shouldn’t share their practices? I did say that companies with poor cultures that do implement such policies are more likely to do it to cover their asses. Changing a culture is heavy lifting, and normally requires a complete change in leadership.
Sad thing that when Gregg Abbot signed that into law he for sure had already benefited from government efforts to help the disabled. As usual, (and this will be next in this discussion) one thing that is curiously not touched on is that this is indeed just the latest effort from the right to politicize an issue that also benefited women.
It is no coincidence to me that the same congress critters that put judges in power to ban abortion are also very hard into ending anything that can help women in the workplace. That minorities are also affected is also a factor that many in the right expect as a result of demonizing DEI.