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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32428 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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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:

Earnings Before Interests and Taxes (EBIT) margins

McKinsey & Company’s global study of more than 1,000 companies in 15 countries found that organizations in the top quartile of gender diversity were more likely to outperform on profitability—25% more likely for gender diverse executive teams and 28% more likely for gender-diverse boards. Organizations in the top quartile for ethnic/cultural diversity among executives were 36% more likely to achieve above-average profitability. At the other end of the spectrum, companies in the bottom quartile for both gender and ethnic/cultural diversity were 27% less likely to experience profitability above the industry average. Researchers measured profitability by using average EBIT margins

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?

I was under the impression that bolstering diversity scores raises ESG scores which in turn allow you access to more and more funding. When you make your workforce more diverse you're in large part making it worse, but you are also making it easier to borrow large sums of money at low/zero interest, and that will show up in the numbers somewhere. Bad move for the longterm, but most of the people making those decisions aren't interested in the long term and won't be harmed by the eventual consequences (they will be using their golden parachute to take a nice and relaxing flight to a similar position in another company).

I think this is the goal, not the state of current practice for lending. And EBIT wouldn’t consider it. It’s pretty much revenue less opex.

Could be some sort of selection bias. Craft your filters in just the right way. Easily within the capabilities of any Accenture associate.

My default assumption is that any kind of financial figure associated with DEI initiatives is massaged and distorted, and those funds could easily be "laundered" out of the statistical analysis. I have worked in a professional capacity long enough to know that you can make the numbers say whatever you want, and in this case they don't even need to try too hard - if you launch an objection to those figures, you're effectively arguing for the racist position, and nobody competent enough to get the qualifications required is going to do something that terrible for their future employability.

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