Why Do Diversity Programs Fail? (And How to Make them Work.)
Why Do Diversity Programs Fail? (And How to Make them Work.)
Appears in this episode
For the past years, Frank Dobbin, a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University, has been researching diversity initiatives at big corporations and academic institutions. He has consistently come to the same, sobering conclusion: They don’t tend to work. And in many cases, they actually backfire.
In this nuts-and-bolts conversation with Yascha Mounk, Dobbin explains why diversity programs so often fail: Especially if they are mandatory, they tend to portray decision-makers as part of the problem, and to threaten them with adverse consequences if they do something wrong.
Instead, he suggests, diversity programs should invite decision-makers to become active advocates for change by making initiatives voluntary and empowering managers to make their own decisions about how to recruit more members of underrepresented groups.
Please do take the time to listen to our conversation.
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Why Do Diversity Programs Fail? (And How to Make them Work.)
This is very helpful. I've been doing a bit of work on this subject. The more I do, the more I come to the conclusion that you must first focus on the "entry point" of discussion (this goes for most anything today given our polarized society). The substance and facts are certainly core to finishing the conversation, but without an access point that focuses on building trust and treating the "other" as an individual (not merely an aggregation of one's group affiliation), you get honest engagement. Irshad Manji's - Don't Label Me outlines the pitfalls, but, more importantly, provides strategies for engaging (Haidt's Openmind.org is also great). Although Frank Dobbin honestly avoided making conclusions about the efficacy of Anti-Racism's approach to address these core issues, I struggle to see how they could be any better than the failed "involuntary" courses focused on the legal implications. To me, they seem much worse as they first paint all members of a certain race as racist by definition. Shame and humiliation is not a great motivator for self reflection or for changing minds . . . for anyone.
Thanks for this great insight into evidence-based diversity training. I found it enlightening and especially encouraging to hear about specific solutions that are more creative than workshops or quotas.
However I noted that there seemed to be an unspoken assumption throughout that all racial/gender disparity must be caused by an anti-meritocratic fault in the system, and that it is impossible that preferences and skills are not evenly distributed amongst every ethnicity and gender. Coleman Hughes is one of many commentators who’ve argued that this assumption is not tenable: https://quillette.com/2018/07/19/black-american-culture-and-the-racial-wealth-gap/?v=322b26af01d5. One need only consider the “over” representation of Jews in so many fields to realise that there is no inherent contradiction between meritocracy and ethnic disparity. If white bias or obliviousness caused all ethnic disparity then whites should be over-represented in every field (which they very drastically are not). I've no doubt that racial bias continues to have an impact, but I think that if all racial bias were eliminated some ethnic disparities would actually widen, not narrow (e.g. "over"-representation of Asians in high-income fields).
This issue is extremely uncomfortable to discuss, but unavoidable given how absolutely central it is to discussions about race and gender. Why should we assume that more proportional representation of all ethnicities and genders in every role is always the correct measurement of a diversity program’s success?