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There exists an entire consulting industry that performs research on the benefits of DEI training, the benefits of a more diverse workforce, the success of organizations which have more women/LGBT people in leadership positions, etc. Here is the consulting company Accenture's summary of the benefits of DEI to companies and organizations that adopt their practices.
I am of the belief that it is people's knowledge, experience and competence that determines whether or not an organization will be successful in its goals. It seems extremely unlikely to me that any problem corporations are interested in solving becomes easier the more members of your project team possess a uterus. Likewise, it seems unlikely your organization will gain magical insight into any real problem of interest by virtue hand-selecting team members whose ancestors have a specific continent of origin. And I have a hard time believing there is a benefit to adding more members of your team who are sexually aroused by humans who share their same sex organs (or adding members of your team who wish to change their sex organs via surgery or chemical sterization).
My priors are stacked so incredibly hard against studies which demonstrate that there is actually a benefit to structuring teams based on hand-selecting people who are LGBT, people from Africa, or adding more women. Indeed, it feels like if you lower qualifications to hire people from these groups, it can only result in organizations which are less qualified.
I'm wondering how it is possible that these consulting companies succeed in designing studies that show the opposite of (what I believe to be) reality. Is it all publication bias and p-hacking? My intuition says that it is. But there are some pretty powerful-looking studies that seem to be hard to explain via that explanation alone. Looking at an example of one of the studies done by McKinsey in the above link:
What is the plausible mechanism behind which research that shows these kind of results are created? Are they measuring something that is real (i.e. does a more diverse workforce actually make companies more money)? Or are the brilliant people at McKinsey meticulously hand-selecting the companies to design studies which will show the opposite of reality?
My prior would be, McKinsey will meticulously hand-select companies to design studies that will flatter elite opinion. Staying on the right side of the right people is how those lucrative public contracts keep flowing in.
I've never heard any mechanism proposed either. Do you know if they controlled for company size? Would be funny if they were just measuring returns to scale, with big companies having more diverse employees due to having more resources to devote to DEI.
I don’t think you actually have to hand select companies very hard, because there’s lots of infra-oriented companies with low margins because they have to maintain lots of infrastructure and workforces that are as white and male as you’d expect blue collar infrastructure workforces to be. Just stuff the ‘low diversity’ group with those and let companies with more normal profit margins and representations contrast, then don’t double check how far the best fit line extends.
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Yet there can be costs to diversity (eg communication issues, cultural differences causing strife). I do believe in balance the sign is likely positive but almost certainly dwarfed by competence (ie a competent workforce trumps a diverse one).
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Is it not usually something along the lines of "Different backgrounds = different perspectives + more domain information"?
I watched a documentary on the Yorkshire Ripper the other day, and (the show alleged) that the retrospective enquiry into "Why did it take so long to catch him" concluded that, because the task force was composed near-exclusively of set-in-their-ways Old Boys 1970s Norf FC supporters, they for years stuck to the theory that any working-class woman out unchaperoned at night was a prostitute, therefore the Ripper was targeting prostitutes, and that made them incorrectly focus their inquiries in that direction. Whereas if they'd had a few women in senior police roles maybe they could have said "Hey wait a minute, a women out at night isn't automatically a whore".
How this lesson against groupthink applies to other industries I'm not sure, but if you're marketing consumer goods then it might be profitable if you have a gay or a black to ask them what's the "in" colours amongst the minority community this season, or something, idk.
Similarly, two Milwaukee cops managed to be convinced by Jeffrey Dahmer that a naked14-yr-old Laotian kid was actually his 19-yr-old boyfriend. Given well-established issues re cross-racial eyewitness identification and the like, it seems possible that an Asian cop, or perhaps even a non-Asian cop who had seen photos of the kids of Asian colleagues, might have been less likely to have been fooled.
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Thank you for reminding me of this classic meme, gonna do a little binge.
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