Implied on what took place already in Texas and many other places with right wing majorities.
And what you replied next deftly omits what @Odesio posted early, many companies do not do it because of the liability issues.
By who? Seems like you are making a huge attribution to me.
Well, in the past I have seen you adopt a lot of what the right is pushing, so if that is not the case, do you disagree on what Greg Abbot and their ilk are doing regarding DEI?
I’ll grant that the described format of the studies (which begin about halfway down the article) seem reasonable. However, they also sound like small tests on small groups of college students. Given that professors are liable to run such tests many years in a row, I’d want to know how many years it was run before giving a positive result and how many professors also ran similar studies and what percentage of those had positive and negative results, and whether the results stay true in larger studies.
Statements like, “When a Black person presented a dissenting perspective to a group of white people, the perspective was perceived as more novel and led to broader thinking and consideration of alternatives than when a white person introduced that same dissenting perspective . The lesson: when we hear dissent from someone who is different from us, it provokes more thought than when it comes from someone who looks like us.” Seems like a much larger and more specific takeaway than one can get from a study like what is described. They don’t have brain reading scanners. That seems like an opinion piece and, if it came from the author of one of the studies, then that brings into question the neutrality of the person running the study and how fairly they conducted it. If we ran the video back, maybe we’d see him prompting the students in the multi-ethnic study more, to think harder, where he didn’t do so when it was a single-ethnicity study, for example.
This isn’t to say that such a thing happened, just that I’m not favoring a large weight to give to this particular set of research. As said, I’d want to see replication, larger groups, to be sure that the person running the study can’t influence the outcomes, and to be sure that the participants aren’t aware of what they’re being asked to model.
Comparatively, the later research, “In 2014 [some professors] examined the ethnic identity of the authors of 1.5 million scientific papers written between 1985 and 2008 […]. They found that papers written by diverse groups receive more citations and have higher impact factors than papers written by people from the same ethnic group. Moreover, they found that stronger papers are associated with greater numbers of not only references but also author addresses—geographical diversity is a reflection of more intellectual diversity.”
Here, we’re dealing with large enough bodies of evidence, uninfluenced by the researchers, that there’s actually enough heft to it, to take seriously. That said, I’d want to check the research further to see if they account for things like:
- The largest cause for a multi-ethnic paper is because it’s multi-national. A multi-national study is complicated to operate and only worth doing if it’s for something serious and important. It’s that seriousness and importance that causes those papers to be more prominent. They are liable to have had larger budgets, longer time frames, and larger sample sizes. They’re more often quoted because they should be more often quoted.
- A multi-ethnic paper is more likely to have more authors (it’s impossible to have a multi-ethnic paper and only one author, for example). More authors means a larger social network to share their paper with and, thus, more references from other papers.
- Similarly, a multi-national paper will have been produced in more universities in more countries and, thus, the social network of those universities and countries becomes larger
- A multi-national paper might be translated into more languages and thus have more chance to gain prominence since the separate languages provide separate communities. Some communities are probably more content-deprived and anything published in those languages will be able to travel farther and faster, to find new social nodes to re-enter back into the other, more popular languages.
A lot of the DEI stuff reminds me of the cycles that business has gone through over the years as management fads. If management really cares about quality, for instance, they don’t need to have a bunch of meetings with consultants about Six Sigma or whatever the latest fad is. They have already put in place a culture and procedures that prioritize quality, empower workers to stop something if quality fails, and actually continually work to implement and improve the policies and procedures they have. If they’re just jumping on a fad, workers get stuck in a number of pointless meetings where the most that might come out of them are some free lunches and a cargo cult mentality of how to implement whatever the highly paid consultant has pitched.
Aside: The very notion of “Six Sigma” is based on faulty premises. Measuring things in “sigmas” only makes sense for Gaussian distribution, and no real-world distribution is ever actually Gaussian for a whole six standard deviations out. If you try to plan around “six sigma” events, you’ll end up getting bitten by unanticipated black swans.
So there’s been a lot of discussion here about DEI as it pertains to corporate culture. I thought I might offer a nonprofit perspective. This is based on my personal experience working with nonprofits of various sizes since about 2007.
When you have an agency that is dedicated to addressing a local need, you will find that you are serving people from minority demographics, whether that be people of low socioeconomic status, people of color, people with disabilities, etc. My agency deals with domestic violence and sexual assault survivors which tend to be predominantly women of low SES, a good chunk of whom are people of color. Everyone who enters our shelter, for example, is considered a specific type of homeless by HUD (Category 4, fleeing.) You have clients that come with a lot of disadvantages. In the biz we call them “marginalized communities.”
I think it’s fair to say that one of the research questions arising from serving people from marginalized communities is “How do we do it better?” And many academics in social welfare (who usually have a lot of direct experience in social services provision) concluded that there is a marked difference in outcomes when clients are served by people that look like them, that have lived experience with the issue they are dealing with, etc. People feel more comfortable and more understood that way.
But in reality, many of the administrative staff of nonprofit organizations are fairly well-educated, which means they have often had access to resources that their clients haven’t had. You tend to find a lot of race and class stratification in larger nonprofits, with white people at the top (usually a man as the President, CEO or CFO), maybe some middle managers/Directors of color and then first-line staff of low SES and diverse ethnic backgrounds. The people making the decisions are not typically the ones with lived experience.
How to close that gap?
I think this is where DEI comes in. And I want to say that while I agree with DEI in theory, I’m fairly agnostic on whether its current incarnation as a series of trainings is a true best practice or just lip service. At any rate, I work in development, as the Grants Manager, and nonprofits of today eat, sleep and breathe DEI. We have to, because it’s mandated by most of our funders. Funders want to know exactly what the demographic makeup of your board and executive leadership is, what DEI initiatives you are working on across the agency, whether or not your staff are representative of the people you serve. I probably get ten emails a day about various DEI-related events going on locally.
I do want to reiterate that I think this stuff is important. It affects how staff collaborate and how much risk they feel they can take - and we all know risk leads to innovation. When you’re doing work around a specific mission, social cohesion is of utmost importance. You need that social cohesion to do hard work serving survivors, you need survivors to trust not just their counselor or direct staff member but that the agency as a whole has their back. It matters very much not just politically but in terms of impact how survivors view the agency. Visibility of diverse representation can be the determining factor of whether someone Black, or gay, or trans, or disabled reaches out for help.
My agency had an identity crisis a couple of years back. It has long identified as a grassroots organization that places supreme value on racial and ethnic diversity, gender diversity, people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, etc. Then after the pressures of COVID, a bunch of long-time executive staff members stepped down and the new President/CEO was a white woman with no nonprofit experience and no experience in progressive spaces. What happened is a lot of Black people quit, particularly people in leadership positions who had been at the agency for 20 or 30 years, and while we still have some staff of color, our diversity committee was basically gutted. I would say we have a strong executive leadership team in most respects, but I don’t really feel like I work at the same progressive, grass-roots agency I used to work at. Some of my favorite people are gone, and they were gay people, trans people, Black people, Latina people, people who had carved out a path for survivors with those identities based on a wealth of knowledge and experience.
I don’t have a lot of time left but maybe I can continue later. I just think all this handholding about microaggressions in these DEI trainings might be a little beside the point when you have straight white people in charge with no clear idea of what a path toward equity would look like - and I think the #1 thing my agency could do to prove it values equity is raise the wages of its front line and crisis line staff across the board, most of whom are low SES and many of whom are Black. Administration tends to be really concerned about the wages of administration, you know. I’m sure that’s universal. (In all fairness, I work directly with budget issues, so it’s often easier said than done. It’s easier to come by money to raise admin wages than front-line staff because such funds are typically restricted for certain purposes.) But anyway. My 2c.
I don’t know much about “DEI” specifically. In another thread, someone took me to task for using that term. I did not know of any other term to use. And - yeah - I agree with many that workplace training is generally worthless, and employers tend to provide such training instead of actually doing anything meaningful.
My position is basically that in America white people, and especially cis white males, have had enough of an advantage for long enough that more aggressive steps ought to be taken to encourage greater diversity at all levels. As I see it, a significant challenge is promoting diversity if the non-diverse candidate is apparently significantly superior.
In order to allow minority candidates to compete, the greatest efforts need to address education and health inequities for the youngest children. Most likely change the US system of locally funded school systems. By the time a kid has made it through 5-10-12 years of crappy public school, it is hard for that kid to compete with a kid from more privileged areas. And hard to encourage colleges to admit someone who is likely to fail, and employers to handle a clearly weaker candidate.
But by the time you get to college, and in the workplace, I am all for encouraging student bodies, workforces and management which more closely resemble the nation’s gender and ethnic makeup. I have no problem with education using admissions quotas, and workplaces being given tax incentives to accomplish that. I don’t know - can there be added support for schools that reach out to underserved students? Perhaps offer more remedial classes, maybe as part of a 5-year degree for underqualified students?
And further action definitely needs to be taken to encourage voting participation by and reduce voter suppression of all minorities.
Apologies if this doesn’t well answer the ongoing discussion.
One of my gripes about DEI is that the surface-level DEI seems to be perceived as the same as deeper DEI. Many people, again, take it to mean nothing other than skin color or gender.
Using the most superficial notion of DEI - “more women and POC” - by this logic, you could have a Supreme Court consisting of nine Clarence Thomases and Amy Barretts, and it would be fabulous DEI. All black or female judges!
From a few decades of being on the SDMB and keeping up with the news, the only successful measure that I’ve ever read about was to ensure that minorities are living with higher-level communities. If they’re pushed into bad communities, they’ll go to bad schools, socialize with people with negative outlooks and behaviors, and end up becoming much the same.
The problem that has been encountered when trying to implement this solution is that when cities try to force property developers to provide housing for low income families, as a small percentage of the overall community, the developers simply refuse to do so, blaming laws that don’t allow them to kick people out for non-payment, disturbing the neighbors, causing regular police visits, etc. One problem tenant can drive out dozens and hundreds of others, if they’re partying, setting things on fire, strewing empty bottles and needles everywhere. You’re not just out the rent from one unit. The developers opt to look at other cities and other states.
Cities have a reasonable position to create something like government-managed housing for the needy (e.g. The Projects), but they’re unlikely to want to take over the role of a traditional property developer, creating apartments, townhouses, condos, etc. for people of the middle and upper classes, maintaining leasing offices, salespeople, etc. And, even if they did, they might run into the ramifications of their own laws and see whole buildings become mostly empty and populated only by the poor, because a bad egg couldn’t be removed, drove away people who could afford to live elsewhere, the prices dropped to allow for more poor folk, leading to a snowballing effect.
Likely, what is needed are distributed micro-Projects that perform double-duty as a police koban. However, then you run into the risk that some officer takes advantage of his position, bullying or abusing the occupants, which then can become a big scandal that ruins everything for everyone. Either you need to staff up each micro-project with so many officers that there’s enough redundancy to negate the potential for misbehavior (making the effort too costly), give the officers immunity from suit, in which case even more will misbehave, or suffer the political damage of letting things stay as they are, arguing that no system is perfect and that we shouldn’t sink the whole thing because of one bad egg. You don’t stay in office, as a politician, by arguing that life can’t be perfect and sometimes bad things happen.
I’m not super optimistic.
Most likely, we’re stuck waiting for a better idea to come along than all the ones that we have had so far.
Like if there were no examples (even from dopers reporting in this thread), showing that this can work.
So yes, the perfect is the enemy of the good.
As for demanding more evidence, one big bit that you missed is that a lot of the evidence spans decades already.
Last year was a big one for diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). There was growing recognition of neuroinclusion, with DEI’s remit expanding to help support diversity of thought and involve individuals with autism, ADHD and other styles of learning and thinking. There was greater emphasis placed on the multigenerational workplace and a focus on how age diversity could bring about better business outcomes.
Data was in the spotlight: More and more, DEI professionals sought to collect and report metrics around such things as gender, race and ethnicity, tracking progress across areas such as hiring and promotion in order to identify obstacles. But there was also some negative press around DEI, as high-profile individuals cut back on DEI programs or dismissed DEI as a “nice-to-have” and not a “need-to-have.”
Despite all this, there’s every reason to think 2024 will be an even bigger year.
The business case is (even) stronger.
Those of us working in and around the DEI field know first-hand how effective DEI can be when initiatives are thought-through, data-driven and have the backing of the higher-ups. We’ve seen studies showing how DEI policies can improve essential workplace outcomes, from employee engagement, which has positive knock-on effects on productivity and profitability, as well as innovation, which is essential in any business—especially during volatile times.
Now, we have even more reason to be convinced of DEI’s value. In a new report, "Diversity matters even more: The case for holistic impact," McKinsey & Company researchers concluded that the business case for DEI was “the strongest it has been since we’ve been tracking.” Moreover, the researchers found that leadership diversity was “associated with holistic growth ambitions, greater social impact, and more satisfied workforces.”
What really stands out is the finding that the business case for gender diversity on executive teams has more than doubled over the past decade. McKinsey has now produced four reports on diversity, noting a steady upward trend. Each time researchers assessed the data, they found that the likelihood of financial outperformance had grown. The 2015 report showed that top-quartile companies had a 15% greater likelihood of financial outperformance versus their bottom-quartile peers. This year, that figure hit 39%.
The first portion your quote sounds to me like it was evidence based. The entire study was revolving around how race affects the discussion of dissent. So including in the study design an objective measure the extent to which the participants expressed that they thought an idea was novel would be not at all surprising. As for the portion after the “the lesson:” that is obviously more speculative, being an interpretation of what they found. But again I suspect that this hypothesis came from the discussion section of the paper, rather than being editorializing on the part of Scientific American.
If the experimenters were participating in the discussion then that would defeat the entire purpose of the study. The way these studies would be done would be to have the experimenters introduce the participants and explain to them their roles, but after that leave the discussion entirely to the participants, while they left the room with the tape running. Or alternatively send to transcript to a third unaffiliated test group and ask them to highlight those section that they decided indicated the speaker thought an argument was novel.
ETA: I managed to track down the study (would it kill scientific American to include a list of references), and got it right for the most part. They determined the extent to which a perspective was viewed as novel by a survey at the end of the study specifically asking them.
Also the sample size was definitely large enough such that the p-value for their finding was p<0.001
These are, again, correlative. It does imply causation but it doesn’t demonstrate it.
To give more examples of alternate hypotheses that would (at the high level) produce the same research:
- Businesses hire locally. If you’re an urban-headquartered business then your talent pool is more likely to be diverse. If you’re a rural-headquartered business then your talent pool is more likely to be non-diverse. Urban-headquartered businesses are more likely to be in growth industries like tech. Rural-headquartered businesses are more likely to be in commodity industries like agriculture. The former grows faster than the latter.
- High growth industries need more workers to continue scaling. This often means pulling in extra labor from other countries (e.g. Mexico, India, China, etc.). Low growth industries can largely subsist with native-born workers.
- High growth businesses are liable to convert into multinational businesses. This means that they now have offices abroad and are, de facto, a multi-ethnic business.
Now, again, perhaps if we dive into the details we might see that this is all ruled out. You’re posting links to pop journalism articles that casually handwave towards “research”. It doesn’t give much insight into questions of what was actually done, at a highly detailed level.
If you can track down the real research, and the methodologies, then we can discuss something. But any of us with Google and some quick typing can find any number of “research” items to support our positions.
The devil is in the details.
That is fine, in a way to attempt to dismiss the evidence that one is not checking, but @Buck_Godot did. 
One think to observe here: a lot of what is coming from the right, that influences a lot of misguided moderates, is coming from guys that in the past declared that it would be a disaster to get women and minorities in big corporations or businesses. One thing to observe here is that the evidence is showing that it is not a bad thing. However, in modern days the right wing likes to say when claiming it will be a disaster is to say: “Get Woke, Get Broke”.
But the observation here is not about prejudiced memes from the right, it is to notice that if the evidence would had shown the result of more diversity to be just a neutral or even thing, then that would also had demonstrated that what the right said before any changes were made to be just poppycock.
I’d put that as more nuanced than you’re making it.
For one, we need to decide things like:
- Men and women are the same and equal.
- Men and women are different, and might not be equal in all ways for all things.
If it’s the first then there’s no diversity increase. You just have raw increases in worker counts. In the modern world, with microwaves, indoor plumbing, etc. you’d be silly to not bring women into the work force since the labor division wouldn’t be equitable and you’d be wasting a large portion of your workforce. Any country that didn’t take advantage of the hands that have been freed by technology would fall behind others that did.
If it’s the second, then demanding equity isn’t necessarily reasonable. We would expect the differences to make men and women stronger in particular fields and in different ways, but we can’t guarantee that those balance out. In physical sport, for example, I only know of climbing, volleyball, and race car driving where - so far - there’s some indication that men and women can compete at an equal level. For everything else, mens’ bodies are generally better adapted to high-level physical activities.
We could theorize, for example, that we’re just playing the wrong sports. Men were dominant in society for thousands of years, chose games they liked as the “important” ones, and those rose to prominence. Sports that women were better at were largely suppressed and, until we rediscover those, it will simply continue to be an unfair landscape to women.
Likewise, we can theorize that as time goes on, women will turn out to be better at business, product design, AI research, and all of the things that make money, than men are.
Ultimately, society is put into a questionable spot. We’re proceeding with the assumption that both 1 and 2 are true, when we know that they can’t both be.
And if we follow that forward, it lands us in an uncomfortable spot.
For example, we may determine that one of the genders isn’t as productive as the other, that “equity” is iniquitous, and there’s a rise in demands to subject the inferior sex (whichever that ends up being) to the demands of the superior one. We’ll have gone from millennia of assuming that one side is better, to having a period of questioning that assumption and putting it to the test. Do we really want to get an answer? Does something good come out of that?
We may realize that some differences are worse and need to be dropped. It’s like UFC, you try out all the techniques and, when some prove to be a failure, you stop using them. Ultimately, whatever differences there are that women are bringing will either migrate into the male world or be dropped, and vice versa. We end up as a monoculture, anyways. Diversity simply means that we’ve got work to do, removing diversity. But what if one or both sides are resistant to that? You’re basically saying that their maleness or femaleness is wrong.
The naysayers from the past would say that this whole thread is just evidence of the complexity of all of this. If you just kept it simple, kept following the “natural” order, everyone kept in their place, etc. then you don’t need to angst yourself over all these worries. And that is true. What they feared is what’s come to pass. We - you and I - are just not concerned about life being complicated and messy. For them, it’s a horror. They predicted it and we’re demonstrating its truth.
Moving on.
I would also say that I’m pretty sold on the idea that the greatest cause of the widening income gap is assortative marriage. And, with that widening gap comes higher risk of crime, violence, etc.
Putting women back into the kitchen, I do NOT believe to be the solution to that. Better taxation strategies and efforts to get people to meet more people outside of their social class are (IMHO) a lot better solutions. But there has been a fair amount of hand wringing on this forum, over the years, about income disparity. So it’s really not as easy as saying that getting women in the workforce has been 100% upsides-only. It has produced large knock-on effects. I think they’re worth it, but you shouldn’t gloss over them.
Here’s an example of a benefit of diversity from 100 years ago.
When Kotex was first marketed, the biggest problem was how to advertise and sell it. Women’s magazines refused to run ads that would scandalize the poor women in their audience. Need I mention that the publishers of these magazines were all men?
The executives of Kimberly Clark and their ad exec (the guy who invented Smoky Bear) met with the publisher of Ladies Home Journal, I think, and got the negative response. The ad exec thought to have the publisher bring in his secretary. She was sjhown the ad, thought it was great, and the guy finally decided it would not be too shocking to the ladies to run after all.
If they still had male secretaries, the ad would never have run.
A lot of pondering to miss the evidence (links are in the posted links) and I even linked to a few of them already. So when you said early that “we can discuss something when the research is tracked” you are not looking then. What @Chronos pointed out still stands:
“Equal” does not mean “identical”. Men and women are equal, but are not identical.
Do you want to stand by that quote attribution?