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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?
Your link admits:
So WindeningGyre's suggestion of selection bias seems very plausible to me. (Another possibility: the most prestigious companies hire from elite schools, so they get employees who are already woke-aligned, and expect/implement these trainings). I'm not sure about the noise aspect, since in at least some cases there's both a large effect size and sample size (although maybe the effect size increases the chance of selection bias). For example:
That seems nearly impossible to generate from noise mining, but also too large to just be a result of having more women in leadership.
Some others seem to have more believable effect sizes. E.g.
2% more cash flow seems believable to me, and 3,000 companies is probably enough data that it isn't noise (although they could always have checked very many outcomes).
However, I think there are some plausible explanations that are at least somewhat favorable to "DEI."
I would not expect, a priori, interviewers and other people involved in the hiring process to be doing a particularly good job. As described in https://youtube.com/watch?v=5eW6Eagr9XA&ab_channel=Veritasium, interviewers don't have fast feedback and may be worse at predicting performance than a simple algorithm. Companies may also face principal-agent problems, where mid-level employees over-hire to make their own team seem more important. And individuals may very well be biased, even if the effect size for the whole market is much smaller than activists claim. So it wouldn't be particularly difficult to improve upon that.
Whether DEI actually does so depends on what it actually consists of. Just saying "hire more blacks and women no matter what" could maybe help if the company in question does engage in outright discrimination (or to be specific, its employees do), since it would correct a legitimately poor practice. More likely, a company might implement changes like having a longer interview process, having more people interview candidates, making the questions and the acceptable answers more consistent, etc. This would correct for some amount of individual bias, but would also improving the hiring pipeline more generally (something James Damore pointed out in his infamous memo). I know that many tech companies have extensive hiring processes for this reason; whether it does anything to increase female or minority representation I can only speculate.
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