Thank you for this article. Earlier this year, I analyzed the "landmark" Herrick and McKinsey studies, which allegedly established that diversity made businesses more profitable. The Herrick study alone had over 1800 academic citations.
It was complete garbage: due to an amateur-hour coding error, companies for which sales were unknown were coded as $88,888,888,888! And that was just the beginning. Yet it was widely praised and cited for nearly a decade -- until some more conscientious researchers exposed its flaws.
When researchers believe so strongly in a particular cause and wish for a particular outcome so much, objective studies are elusive.
I have a long corporate career where I have been responsible for overseeing all the projects of the company. My project managers form project teams made up of key resources that are the knowledge experts representing the key functional stakeholders to the change that would take place from the outcomes of the project.
Superficial diversity, the type that is pushed by the left and has been politically weaponized as DEI, part of the toxic and parasitic mind virus of Theory, is not only useless, it is destructive in terms of achieving the best project performance. Because nothing matters more in the makeup of the project team resources than does the individual capabilities of those individuals. The same is true for functional work teams.
Diversity in this case is a strength only when being defined as diversity of roles, but only too if the team selected covers are subject matter domains required. Pursuing goals of diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., is worthless and disruptive. It is sub-optimizing because it replaces the need to carefully select based on merit.
The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts with respect to collaborative work, but not when the group dynamic is upset with a mismatch of capability levels because of superficial diversity criteria in selecting resources.
Until this essay I had never heard anyone argue that diversity might be "inherently harmful to team cohesion." What an awful thing to even contemplate. Who can't work effectively in a team with people of different races, genders and ages than themselves? Even if it were true (and no, it's not), what could an organization do about it other than impose some kind of outright segregation? I am not surprised this came out "negative."
Rather, the specific and often-made claim, whether true or false, is that affirmative-action style imposed diversity hurts organizations through a different channel: by hiring and promoting people based on immutable identity traits rather than by merit. Variations of this claim have been made vocally by the world's richest man (Musk), by the entire anti-DEI apparatus, and by the Supreme Court of the United States in their big college admission case last year.
And of course the real counter to the "pro" diversity argument, that different viewpoints are healthy for a team, is that: age, race and gender provide a VERY poor proxy for "different viewpoints." That is doubly the case when many organizations are viewed as directly hostile to actual dissenting (i.e. conservative) viewpoints on most topics.
So if you are going to dive into the merits of Diversity arguments, in a magazine called "persuasion", I think it would be more persuasive to engage with the arguments actually presented by the opposition here.
"[A]ge, race and gender provide a VERY poor proxy for 'different viewpoints.' "
It's an invitation to populate the workplace with walking stereotypes whose "different" viewpoints are informed almost exclusively by the progeny of the critical studies movement. Hello grievance, goodbye productivity.
An organization may look diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, age, gender, etc. However, if the members of the organization have all been recruited through the same system, have all come up through the same organizational structure, and all share the same educational background, then their thinking and approach to problem solving will not be diverse.
Further, organizations tend to promote "true believers" and put them on problem-solving teams. The issue then becomes that once an organization's way of doing business appears completely logical to an individual, the value of that individual in terms of making improvements and solving problems is greatly diminished.
Thank you, but I find this confusing. If we detect minimal effects from diversity, how do we know it's because the effects of negative cohesion and broader thinking cancel each other out? Was each of these effects studied independently, such that we know that each effect is real and that they are of approximately the same size, such that they cancel? I suspect not, which casts the whole claim into doubt.
Also, you list various kinds of diversity as if they're equivalent. Do we really expect gender diversity, age diversity and racial diversity to behave in exactly the same ways? Again, doubtful.
That "diversity can improve performance by bringing new perspectives to the table" is largely essentialist nonsense. Let's assume for the sake of argument that out gay men (I am one) are historically underrepresented in workplaces with an alpha male bro office culture.
What "new perspectives" am I supposed to bring to the table? Am I supposed to be the team's advocate for gay equality? Isn't that HR's job? What if I'm not an activist by nature? Am I expected to model gay attitudes and behaviors that will help the team overcome certain bro-ish tendencies that hold them back? Is there even such a thing as a gay perspective? Am I supposed to be the queer eye for the commercial real estate guys? There are as many gay perspectives as there are gay subcultures or, arguably, gay men. From a practical standpoint, will my annual performance reviews include a quantitative assessment of how the new perspectives I've brought to the workplace have improved the team's performance?
What if, instead, we justify my presence in this bastion of hearty masculinity because of what it will do for me? This is in a way the affirmative action model. Give the fag a chance. A higher salary? The chance to develop skills and gain knowledge and experience that will make me more marketable? Access to opportunities that would not be open to me in a pink-collar backroom ghetto where I would be considered a "better fit"? Make me a better worker who contributes to the performance of the group by applying my talents to what I've learned while I've been there?
I agree entirely with these sentiments. I don't have anything special to offer because I'm a woman. But the difference is that for me there's no closet to get into even if I wanted to. The purpose of affirmative action is to ameliorate ongoing discrimination. The diversity defense was a ploy to get a win for the UC system in the Bakke case. And now people believe it. Discrimination in employment is ongoing and documented. Occupational sex segregation hasn't diminished still the 1990s. Without government intervention my prospects would be at best secretarial.
The obvious problem with the "diversity is good" argument is that it assumes that race, age or gender difference automatically translates into diverse viewpoints. As a university professor, I have taught very diverse student bodies in several different countries. I can confidently state that a white Italian student, for example, will have a very different frame of reference from a white American student. The latter will be much closer to a Black American student from a similar socio-economic background than to a student from China or Germany. Even if you believe diversity of viewpoints increases profitability, it is an argument for hiring immigrants, not for DEI.
Sometime in the 1980s we should have taking the nation to Civil Rights 2.0, because Civil Rights 1.0 was passed by Republicans over the opposition of Democrats and the nation had made significant process to eliminate the terrible institutional racism that had existed before. The law of the land was changed and progress was achieved. However, right at the time we should have seen the minority underclass advance into the middle-class, the greedy upper ruling class began to export American working class opportunity to other countries while importing other counties poverty... all for the cheap labor and cheap votes to perpetuate the money and power of the ruling class.
And today the ruling class pushing the narrative that racism and bias still exists and we need divisive and toxic non-solutions like DEI to fix things.
No, what we need is to hobble the elite ruling class from continuing to loot all the economic assets of the country for their fat Wall Street and real estate returns. We need to multiply the paths regular people have access to for earning their own good life. We don't need more tax and spend to pay off the human misery caused by the very people that would tax and spend.
The fix for poor minority communities is to bring back good jobs. It all starts there. If it means that the mega corporations get broken up and penalized and incentivized to stop exporting jobs, then so be it.
We also need massive regulatory reform. The game has been rigged to prevent people from starting and growing a small business. This too has decimated the supply of paths that many minorities would take to access the middle and upper classes.
The Democrats don't like any of this... because the Democrats are the party of elites and the elites do not want the competition.
Thomas, Sowell and others argue in their books that even before the civil rights movement, African-Americans were very upwardly Mobile, in our society, amtheir homeownership rates were very high and their two parent family rates high, too. after the civil rights movement, and also continuing after the great society of LBJ, all sorts of negative outcomes came about culturally, so there was a change culturally that really resulted in a lot of downward trends economically for groups that were making progress, but a lot of that was cultural changes, and also including family composition.
While there are some pretty thin definitions of "diversity" bandied about, the underlying theory, I think, is still right. It's an evolved version of school desegregation from the '60s and '70s, where keeping races apart was viewed (correctly) as reinforcing racial stereotypes. Enabling more racial diversity in children's formative years could break down, at least, the false ideas it's so easy to entertain in the absence of individual members of the group. We have pretty much incorporated this idea into our worldview, and I think it has shown its value -- as well as some of its limits.
With respect to teams, I have a slightly different take. During the long debate over gays in the military, the military's primary argument was that having open lesbians and gay men would undermine unit cohesion. Knowing a troop mate was homosexual would be unsustainable.
That doesn't seem to have been quite as big a problem, as homosexuality has been more widely destigmatized, and on the thin version of diversity, worked in the military in a way similar to the theory of desegregation.
But more substantively, and more relevant to the essay, there is a thicker idea of diversity that has been at work in what we used to call "war movies" when I was growing up. A team of ragtag, mismatched men (they were always men in those days) were thrown together whether they liked it or not. They usually didn't, for both personal reasons, class divisions, and often strongly held racial prejudices.
But they had their mission, and as they faced adversity together, they eventually recognized their shared humanity. Working together toward a goal, they learned that they could overcome not just the military enemy, but their own enemies within.
An iconic film with that theme stripped down to its basics is Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones, with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as escaped convicts shackled together, but having to work together just to survive. Their initial enmity is strong and obvious. But working toward a goal is a great way to prioritize your thinking, and maybe get more in touch with your better angels -- and easier to overcome when your own survival is dependent on cooperation.
That, I think, is a slightly different lesson from the thin diversity we are used to conforming our thinking to. No matter what kind of diversity a work team might exhibit, having a task to perform together can open up relationship possibilities that might have been unimagined, for whatever reasons. The idea seems trivial (and it can be), but it's got a lot of resonance. However it is we are diverse from one another, we can benefit from the simple need of cooperation toward some tangible end. The need to accomplish something together can edge our preconceptions into the margins.
The 'diversity' business was a Noble Lie invented during the Bakke case to provide justification for affirmative action. Affirmative action is absolutely justified and important--not to promote diversity but to ameliorate ongoing discrimination against women and minorities.
LOL. "metastudy" More like a fiction narrative for meta victimology cultists.
News flash... Republicans passed civil rights legislation over the protests of Democrats and the nation began the progressive process of treating all equal... equality baby! But then there was a problem with the corporatist ruling class and their decades of failed liberal policies both threatened by the rise of the victim class (what would all those high-paid non-profit execs do for a living? How would Al Sharpton make his money? How would Democrats appeal to the moocher victim class? ) No, they could not let the days of group conflict pass because the ONLY REMAINING MATERIAL INSTITUTIONAL BIAS LEFT WAS CLASS BIAS... and that was very inconvenient to the upper class liberals in their gated communities where they enjoyed luxury belief virtue signaling to show that they are good and caring people with empathy... as long as those unwashed masses don't end up in their neighborhoods and they continue to own the political power and high Wall Street and real estate returns.
Yes, the Bakke ruling suffered from what I call the broccoli justification for affirmative action. Minority students, like broccoli, were considered good for the student body, by which the Court meant the whites in the student body. The justices discovered an ineluctable quality in black students that enhanced white students' education.
That was preposterous. Qualified minority students go to college for the same reason as their white counterparts, namely to obtain a qualification that will open the door to better job opportunities than the sort that are available to applicants without a college degree. Other benefits include making connections that may be useful later in life.
The story of Bakke, as I understand it, was that Archibald Cox got came up with the idea of diversity as a legitimate aim for affirmative action to avoid objections by conservative justices, who would not accept compensation for past injustices as a legitimate reason for affirmative action. Diversity or compensation is a false dichotomy that wasn't recognized at the time because in 1978 the view was that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the end of Jim Crow meant that discrimination was over or at least soon would be. It was only later, particularly reflecting on ongoing discrimination in the North which had never had official stage mandated segregation, it was realized that discrimination in employment, housing, access to credit, etc. was ongoing. But by then the diversity idea was baked in. So at my university of course we have a growing DEI department and for our last hire in my dept applicants had to submit DEI statements.
For selfish reasons I'm thinking about ongoing discrimination against women in employment. The level of occupational sex segregation hasn't gone down since the 1990s and it's twice as great for jobs that don't require a college degree. The natural experiment of WWII shows that the standard objection --'women wouldn't want THOSE jobs--is baseless. And currently women in Ukraine are happy to do them.
Thank you for this article. Earlier this year, I analyzed the "landmark" Herrick and McKinsey studies, which allegedly established that diversity made businesses more profitable. The Herrick study alone had over 1800 academic citations.
https://jensheycke.substack.com/p/dei-studies-that-prove-nothing
It was complete garbage: due to an amateur-hour coding error, companies for which sales were unknown were coded as $88,888,888,888! And that was just the beginning. Yet it was widely praised and cited for nearly a decade -- until some more conscientious researchers exposed its flaws.
When researchers believe so strongly in a particular cause and wish for a particular outcome so much, objective studies are elusive.
I have a long corporate career where I have been responsible for overseeing all the projects of the company. My project managers form project teams made up of key resources that are the knowledge experts representing the key functional stakeholders to the change that would take place from the outcomes of the project.
Superficial diversity, the type that is pushed by the left and has been politically weaponized as DEI, part of the toxic and parasitic mind virus of Theory, is not only useless, it is destructive in terms of achieving the best project performance. Because nothing matters more in the makeup of the project team resources than does the individual capabilities of those individuals. The same is true for functional work teams.
Diversity in this case is a strength only when being defined as diversity of roles, but only too if the team selected covers are subject matter domains required. Pursuing goals of diversity of race, gender, sexual orientation, etc., is worthless and disruptive. It is sub-optimizing because it replaces the need to carefully select based on merit.
The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts with respect to collaborative work, but not when the group dynamic is upset with a mismatch of capability levels because of superficial diversity criteria in selecting resources.
Until this essay I had never heard anyone argue that diversity might be "inherently harmful to team cohesion." What an awful thing to even contemplate. Who can't work effectively in a team with people of different races, genders and ages than themselves? Even if it were true (and no, it's not), what could an organization do about it other than impose some kind of outright segregation? I am not surprised this came out "negative."
Rather, the specific and often-made claim, whether true or false, is that affirmative-action style imposed diversity hurts organizations through a different channel: by hiring and promoting people based on immutable identity traits rather than by merit. Variations of this claim have been made vocally by the world's richest man (Musk), by the entire anti-DEI apparatus, and by the Supreme Court of the United States in their big college admission case last year.
And of course the real counter to the "pro" diversity argument, that different viewpoints are healthy for a team, is that: age, race and gender provide a VERY poor proxy for "different viewpoints." That is doubly the case when many organizations are viewed as directly hostile to actual dissenting (i.e. conservative) viewpoints on most topics.
So if you are going to dive into the merits of Diversity arguments, in a magazine called "persuasion", I think it would be more persuasive to engage with the arguments actually presented by the opposition here.
"[A]ge, race and gender provide a VERY poor proxy for 'different viewpoints.' "
It's an invitation to populate the workplace with walking stereotypes whose "different" viewpoints are informed almost exclusively by the progeny of the critical studies movement. Hello grievance, goodbye productivity.
An organization may look diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, age, gender, etc. However, if the members of the organization have all been recruited through the same system, have all come up through the same organizational structure, and all share the same educational background, then their thinking and approach to problem solving will not be diverse.
Further, organizations tend to promote "true believers" and put them on problem-solving teams. The issue then becomes that once an organization's way of doing business appears completely logical to an individual, the value of that individual in terms of making improvements and solving problems is greatly diminished.
Thank you, but I find this confusing. If we detect minimal effects from diversity, how do we know it's because the effects of negative cohesion and broader thinking cancel each other out? Was each of these effects studied independently, such that we know that each effect is real and that they are of approximately the same size, such that they cancel? I suspect not, which casts the whole claim into doubt.
Also, you list various kinds of diversity as if they're equivalent. Do we really expect gender diversity, age diversity and racial diversity to behave in exactly the same ways? Again, doubtful.
That "diversity can improve performance by bringing new perspectives to the table" is largely essentialist nonsense. Let's assume for the sake of argument that out gay men (I am one) are historically underrepresented in workplaces with an alpha male bro office culture.
What "new perspectives" am I supposed to bring to the table? Am I supposed to be the team's advocate for gay equality? Isn't that HR's job? What if I'm not an activist by nature? Am I expected to model gay attitudes and behaviors that will help the team overcome certain bro-ish tendencies that hold them back? Is there even such a thing as a gay perspective? Am I supposed to be the queer eye for the commercial real estate guys? There are as many gay perspectives as there are gay subcultures or, arguably, gay men. From a practical standpoint, will my annual performance reviews include a quantitative assessment of how the new perspectives I've brought to the workplace have improved the team's performance?
What if, instead, we justify my presence in this bastion of hearty masculinity because of what it will do for me? This is in a way the affirmative action model. Give the fag a chance. A higher salary? The chance to develop skills and gain knowledge and experience that will make me more marketable? Access to opportunities that would not be open to me in a pink-collar backroom ghetto where I would be considered a "better fit"? Make me a better worker who contributes to the performance of the group by applying my talents to what I've learned while I've been there?
I agree entirely with these sentiments. I don't have anything special to offer because I'm a woman. But the difference is that for me there's no closet to get into even if I wanted to. The purpose of affirmative action is to ameliorate ongoing discrimination. The diversity defense was a ploy to get a win for the UC system in the Bakke case. And now people believe it. Discrimination in employment is ongoing and documented. Occupational sex segregation hasn't diminished still the 1990s. Without government intervention my prospects would be at best secretarial.
The obvious problem with the "diversity is good" argument is that it assumes that race, age or gender difference automatically translates into diverse viewpoints. As a university professor, I have taught very diverse student bodies in several different countries. I can confidently state that a white Italian student, for example, will have a very different frame of reference from a white American student. The latter will be much closer to a Black American student from a similar socio-economic background than to a student from China or Germany. Even if you believe diversity of viewpoints increases profitability, it is an argument for hiring immigrants, not for DEI.
Sometime in the 1980s we should have taking the nation to Civil Rights 2.0, because Civil Rights 1.0 was passed by Republicans over the opposition of Democrats and the nation had made significant process to eliminate the terrible institutional racism that had existed before. The law of the land was changed and progress was achieved. However, right at the time we should have seen the minority underclass advance into the middle-class, the greedy upper ruling class began to export American working class opportunity to other countries while importing other counties poverty... all for the cheap labor and cheap votes to perpetuate the money and power of the ruling class.
And today the ruling class pushing the narrative that racism and bias still exists and we need divisive and toxic non-solutions like DEI to fix things.
No, what we need is to hobble the elite ruling class from continuing to loot all the economic assets of the country for their fat Wall Street and real estate returns. We need to multiply the paths regular people have access to for earning their own good life. We don't need more tax and spend to pay off the human misery caused by the very people that would tax and spend.
The fix for poor minority communities is to bring back good jobs. It all starts there. If it means that the mega corporations get broken up and penalized and incentivized to stop exporting jobs, then so be it.
We also need massive regulatory reform. The game has been rigged to prevent people from starting and growing a small business. This too has decimated the supply of paths that many minorities would take to access the middle and upper classes.
The Democrats don't like any of this... because the Democrats are the party of elites and the elites do not want the competition.
Thomas, Sowell and others argue in their books that even before the civil rights movement, African-Americans were very upwardly Mobile, in our society, amtheir homeownership rates were very high and their two parent family rates high, too. after the civil rights movement, and also continuing after the great society of LBJ, all sorts of negative outcomes came about culturally, so there was a change culturally that really resulted in a lot of downward trends economically for groups that were making progress, but a lot of that was cultural changes, and also including family composition.
Diversity is more helpful in creative work than routine work. No surprise there.
While there are some pretty thin definitions of "diversity" bandied about, the underlying theory, I think, is still right. It's an evolved version of school desegregation from the '60s and '70s, where keeping races apart was viewed (correctly) as reinforcing racial stereotypes. Enabling more racial diversity in children's formative years could break down, at least, the false ideas it's so easy to entertain in the absence of individual members of the group. We have pretty much incorporated this idea into our worldview, and I think it has shown its value -- as well as some of its limits.
With respect to teams, I have a slightly different take. During the long debate over gays in the military, the military's primary argument was that having open lesbians and gay men would undermine unit cohesion. Knowing a troop mate was homosexual would be unsustainable.
That doesn't seem to have been quite as big a problem, as homosexuality has been more widely destigmatized, and on the thin version of diversity, worked in the military in a way similar to the theory of desegregation.
But more substantively, and more relevant to the essay, there is a thicker idea of diversity that has been at work in what we used to call "war movies" when I was growing up. A team of ragtag, mismatched men (they were always men in those days) were thrown together whether they liked it or not. They usually didn't, for both personal reasons, class divisions, and often strongly held racial prejudices.
But they had their mission, and as they faced adversity together, they eventually recognized their shared humanity. Working together toward a goal, they learned that they could overcome not just the military enemy, but their own enemies within.
An iconic film with that theme stripped down to its basics is Stanley Kramer's The Defiant Ones, with Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis as escaped convicts shackled together, but having to work together just to survive. Their initial enmity is strong and obvious. But working toward a goal is a great way to prioritize your thinking, and maybe get more in touch with your better angels -- and easier to overcome when your own survival is dependent on cooperation.
That, I think, is a slightly different lesson from the thin diversity we are used to conforming our thinking to. No matter what kind of diversity a work team might exhibit, having a task to perform together can open up relationship possibilities that might have been unimagined, for whatever reasons. The idea seems trivial (and it can be), but it's got a lot of resonance. However it is we are diverse from one another, we can benefit from the simple need of cooperation toward some tangible end. The need to accomplish something together can edge our preconceptions into the margins.
The 'diversity' business was a Noble Lie invented during the Bakke case to provide justification for affirmative action. Affirmative action is absolutely justified and important--not to promote diversity but to ameliorate ongoing discrimination against women and minorities.
Nope. There is no ongoing material discrimination against women and minorities. Just stop.
You are wrong. Here is a metastudy with extensive empirical data showing that discrimination in employment is ongoing: https://usdintrophil.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/21-duflo.field-experiments-in-discrimination.pdf
Check it out.
LOL. "metastudy" More like a fiction narrative for meta victimology cultists.
News flash... Republicans passed civil rights legislation over the protests of Democrats and the nation began the progressive process of treating all equal... equality baby! But then there was a problem with the corporatist ruling class and their decades of failed liberal policies both threatened by the rise of the victim class (what would all those high-paid non-profit execs do for a living? How would Al Sharpton make his money? How would Democrats appeal to the moocher victim class? ) No, they could not let the days of group conflict pass because the ONLY REMAINING MATERIAL INSTITUTIONAL BIAS LEFT WAS CLASS BIAS... and that was very inconvenient to the upper class liberals in their gated communities where they enjoyed luxury belief virtue signaling to show that they are good and caring people with empathy... as long as those unwashed masses don't end up in their neighborhoods and they continue to own the political power and high Wall Street and real estate returns.
Hit the link. This metastudy was done by a couple of economists at MIT one of whom, Esther Duflo recently won the Nobel Prize in Econ.
Yes, the Bakke ruling suffered from what I call the broccoli justification for affirmative action. Minority students, like broccoli, were considered good for the student body, by which the Court meant the whites in the student body. The justices discovered an ineluctable quality in black students that enhanced white students' education.
That was preposterous. Qualified minority students go to college for the same reason as their white counterparts, namely to obtain a qualification that will open the door to better job opportunities than the sort that are available to applicants without a college degree. Other benefits include making connections that may be useful later in life.
The story of Bakke, as I understand it, was that Archibald Cox got came up with the idea of diversity as a legitimate aim for affirmative action to avoid objections by conservative justices, who would not accept compensation for past injustices as a legitimate reason for affirmative action. Diversity or compensation is a false dichotomy that wasn't recognized at the time because in 1978 the view was that the civil rights legislation of the 1960s and the end of Jim Crow meant that discrimination was over or at least soon would be. It was only later, particularly reflecting on ongoing discrimination in the North which had never had official stage mandated segregation, it was realized that discrimination in employment, housing, access to credit, etc. was ongoing. But by then the diversity idea was baked in. So at my university of course we have a growing DEI department and for our last hire in my dept applicants had to submit DEI statements.
For selfish reasons I'm thinking about ongoing discrimination against women in employment. The level of occupational sex segregation hasn't gone down since the 1990s and it's twice as great for jobs that don't require a college degree. The natural experiment of WWII shows that the standard objection --'women wouldn't want THOSE jobs--is baseless. And currently women in Ukraine are happy to do them.