What is DEI? Diversity, equity and inclusion explained
In order to fully understand, we first must turn to a dictionary to look up the words: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. It is only then that we will be able to see how those words have been manipulated to represent and idea.
- The condition or fact of being different or varied; variety.
- The value of a company, divided into many equal parts owned by the shareholders, or the value of a house that you have been paying for.
- The act of including someone or something as part of a group, list, etc., or a person or thing that is included.
For this writing, the words Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have been twisted to mean “all about people that are against corporations.” or simply stated to mean “we don’t like that someone started a company by working their ass off for 20 years and control who does and does not get hired to work at the company.”
What the population has been fed by a select group of people who feel they are not treated fairly (usually meaning that they are lazy at work and complain to much) is the following:
Diversity, equity and inclusion is a term used to describe policies and programs that promote the representation and participation of different groups of individuals. DEI encompasses people of different ages, races, ethnicity, abilities, disabilities, genders, religions, cultures and sexual orientations. It also covers people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, skills and expertise.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are three different but interconnected concepts. They work together to create an environment of respect and fairness. It involves initiatives promoting the equal access, opportunity, employment and sense of belonging of underrepresented people in the workplace.
DEI plays an important part in promoting an inclusive workplace culture and ensuring an effective recruiting and hiring process. It aims to achieve these goals by overcoming unconscious biases, which are stereotypes about other people formed outside a person’s awareness, and identifying and mitigating microaggressions, which are negative behaviors toward individuals based on those biases.
Diversity involves all the ways that people are different, including the various characteristics that distinguish one demographic or individual from another. Diversity often refers to including demographics that aren’t broadly represented in society or certain industries. Diversity also includes the range of ideas, perspectives and values people have.
Equity aims to ensure equal treatment, access, opportunity and advancement for people, including employees in the workplace. Equity attempts to identify and remove barriers that prevent some groups from fully participating in society or certain jobs and industries.
To promote equity, people often focus on understanding the causes that underlie disparities in society. The aim of equity is to promote justice, fairness and impartiality in the way things are done and in the distribution of resources within social structures, systems and institutions. Equity efforts exist in the workplace, the justice system, schools and other institutions.
Inclusion builds a culture where everyone feels welcome. It actively invites every person and group to contribute and participate. An inclusive, welcoming environment supports and embraces differences. Participants offer respect to everyone in words and actions.
A work environment that’s inclusive is supportive, respectful and collaborative, and encourages all employees to participate and contribute. Organizations with inclusive work environments should eliminate barriers, discrimination and intolerance, and aim to build a workplace in which employees feel they belong and are supported by equitable procedures and socially aware human resources (HR) departments.
Diversity, equity and inclusion are three interconnected concepts that work together to promote healthy communities and places of work free of stereotyping and mistreatment.
What’s not said in all of the rambling above is how much of a trap the DEI initiatives are. Almost all hiring managers and human resources departments have reported trapped/caged feeling they have when it comes to just being able to perform their jobs.
When Joe Biden announced he’d pick a woman of color as his running mate, he thought he was being progressive. Instead, he walked right into a DEI trap, gift-wrapping ammunition for every critic ready to dismiss Kamala Harris as a “diversity hire.” It’s time we talk about the elephant in the room; sometimes, the road to diversity is paved with unintended tokenism.
Here’s a provocative thought; The constant emphasis on hiring “Black” candidates or selecting “women of color” for high-profile positions might actually be setting us back. I never understood how saying “I want a Black person in this role” forwards the cause for Black people in our current time. Maybe at the very, very beginning of the civil rights movement, such explicit declarations made sense. In that overtly-biased environment, one needed to signal their intent to depart from the then-accepted normalcy of racist and sexist practices. Public statements were necessary to break through entrenched cultural barriers and force recognition of how we must change. But as an ongoing, normalizing practice in our day and time? It’s not just ineffective—it’s counterproductive.
This approach – while it is a well-intention public announcement of good faith, it inadvertently reinforces the very divisions we’re trying to overcome and becomes a virtue signal that backfires. It keeps us trapped in a paradigm where we unwittingly make race or gender the primary qualifier in order to prove to others that we are not racist or sexist; overshadowing individual merits, experiences, and potential contributions. When we continually highlight race in hiring decisions, we’re not moving towards a post-racial society; we are regressing on progress and we’re cementing racial categories as the most important aspect of a person’s identity.
Biden’s declaration was the political equivalent of a corporation changing its logo to a rainbow flag for Pride month. It was performative showmanship at its finest, or rather, at its most, misguided. By explicitly tying Harris’s selection to her gender and race, Biden inadvertently reduced her to these characteristics in the public eye. It’s the kind of move that makes corporate PR departments feel good but does little to address broad systemic inequalities except by acting as a flag-bearer for the cause.
This approach is symptomatic of a larger issue in our discourse around diversity. We’ve become so focused on the optics of inclusion that sometimes we lose sight of its substance. It’s as if we believe that merely saying the right things will magically create the change we want to see.
Here’s the feel good scheme; when you trumpet your diversity efforts, you’re implicitly suggesting that without special consideration, underrepresented groups couldn’t compete. It can imply a soft bigotry of low expectations dressed up in progressive clothing. We’ve created a Catch-22 where efforts to promote diversity end up undermining the very individuals they’re meant to elevate. I call this “The Paradox of Publicizing Diversity”.
This paradox extends beyond politics, as in Kamala Harris’ case. In corporate America, we see companies proudly announcing diversity targets, only to face backlash from diversity critics should they make progress toward them. The underlying message becomes, “You must have lowered your standards to have improved your diversity.” It’s an insidious narrative that knocks down both individuals hired and the organizations trying to diversify.
Now, let’s puncture another popular fallacy. The idea that without DEI initiatives, we’d have a pure meritocracy. The myth of meritocracy is particularly pernicious because it allows those who have benefited from systemic advantages to believe they’ve earned everything solely through their own efforts. It’s a comforting fiction that ignores the complex realities of privilege, access, and opportunity and the plain fact that we’ve never had a true meritocracy. Nepotism, the old boys’ network, and good old-fashioned discrimination have been tilting the scales for centuries. DEI isn’t about handing out unfair advantages to achieve an idealized “equality of outcome;” it’s about leveling a long-skewed playing field, ensuring actual meritocracy and genuine “equity of opportunity” for everyone.
Let’s be clear, Kamala Harris was sold to the American people as being eminently qualified. She’s got the chops, the experience, and the political acumen. But by framing her selection initially through the lens of diversity, Biden effectively relegated her impressive resume to a footnote, instead of the primary point. The world also got to witness what an atrocious DEI hire Kamala turned out to be. This qualification quagmire isn’t unique to Harris. How many times have we seen accomplished individuals from underrepresented groups reduced to their demographic characteristics? It’s a subtle form of erasure that ignores the hard work, talent, and perseverance that got them where they are. It’s like introducing Neil deGrasse Tyson as “a Black scientist” instead of “a renowned astrophysicist” who just so happens to be Black.
So, what’s the alternative? Simple. Do the work without the grandstanding. Expand your candidate pool, eliminate biases in your hiring process, and create genuinely inclusive environments. But for the love of progress, don’t pat yourself on the back publicly for doing what you should have been doing all along. Focus on competence first, and let diversity be the cherry on top. Instead of saying, “We’re hiring a woman of color,” the message should be, “We’re hiring the most qualified person for the job, period.” And then, when that person happens to bring diversity to the table, treat it as a valuable bonus, not the main event.
This stealth approach requires a fundamental shift in how we think about diversity. Instead of treating it as a goal to be achieved, we need to see it as an ongoing process. It’s not about hitting a target; it’s about changing the game with each unbiased action we take.
This approach flips the script on traditional diversity initiatives. Instead of starting with demographic targets, we start with a commitment to excellence. The key is ensuring that our definition of excellence isn’t narrowly defined by dominant cultural norms, but is broad enough to recognize and value diverse forms of talent and experience.
Imagine a world where seeing a woman of color in a position of power is so normal it doesn’t merit special mention. That’s the goal. Every time we make a big deal out of a “first,” we’re inadvertently reinforcing the idea that it’s exceptional, rather than expected. Normalization is a powerful force. It’s what turns the extraordinary into the everyday. But it doesn’t happen through public announcements or symbolic displays. It happens through consistent, sustained effort to make diverse representation the rule, not the exception.
The more you publicize your diversity intentions, the more ammunition you give to those who would undermine diverse candidates. It’s time we learned to walk the walk without talking the talk. Let the results speak for themselves. Instead of releasing PR-friendly announcements, we should be asking ourselves hard questions: Are we creating truly inclusive environments? Are we addressing systemic barriers? Are we valuing diverse perspectives in our decision-making processes?
True diversity isn’t ultimately achieved through extroversion – i.e., grand gestures or public pledges. It’s the result of internal, behind-the-scenes work to dismantle systemic barriers and ingrained biases. It’s about creating environments where excellence naturally emerges from a diverse pool of talent. This requires patience and perseverance; in short supply in our world, unfortunately. It’s not about quick wins or easy headlines. It’s about the hard, non-glamorous work of changing cultures, challenging assumptions, and creating new norms. The path to this future isn’t through declarations. It’s through the quiet, persistent work of creating truly equitable systems and cultures. It’s about moving beyond the performative aspects of diversity and into the transformative power of genuine inclusion.
The next time you’re tempted to announce your commitment to diversity, don’t. Instead, continue to quietly build systems that make diversity inevitable. Let your actions echo so loudly that you don’t need to say a word. Lead a silent revolution.
In the end, the most powerful statement on diversity isn’t a statement at all. It’s a reality so normal, so embedded in our institutions, that it needs no announcement, no fanfare, and no justification. That’s when we’ll know we’ve truly arrived.
So let’s stop signaling about diversity and simply embody it. Let’s create institutions and cultures where diversity is so deeply woven into the fabric that it becomes invisible – not because it’s absent, but because it’s everywhere. That’s the kind of diversity that doesn’t need to be announced. It’s the kind that changes the world.
Businesses started caring a lot more about diversity after a series of high-profile lawsuits rocked the financial industry. In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Morgan Stanley shelled out $54 million and Smith Barney and Merrill Lynch more than $100 million each to settle sex discrimination claims. In 2007, Morgan was back at the table, facing a new class action, which cost the company $46 million. In 2013, Bank of America and Merrill Lynch settled a race discrimination suit for $160 million. Cases like these brought Merrill’s total 15-year payout to nearly half a billion dollars.
It’s no wonder that Wall Street firms now require new hires to sign arbitration contracts agreeing not to join class actions. They have also expanded training and other diversity programs. But on balance, equality isn’t improving in financial services or elsewhere. Although the proportion of managers at US commercial banks who were Hispanic rose from 4.7% in 2003 to 5.7% in 2014, white women’s representation dropped from 39% to 35%, and Black men’s from 2.5% to 2.3%. The numbers were even worse in investment banks (though that industry is shrinking, which complicates the analysis). Among all US companies with 100 or more employees, the proportion of Black men in management increased just slightly from 3% to 3.3%, from 1985 to 2014. White women saw bigger gains from 1985 to 2000, rising from 22% to 29% of managers, but their numbers haven’t budged since then. Even in Silicon Valley, where many leaders tout the need to increase diversity for both business and social justice reasons, bread-and-butter tech jobs remain dominated by white men.
It shouldn’t be surprising that most diversity programs aren’t increasing diversity. Despite a few new bells and whistles, courtesy of big data, companies are basically doubling down on the same approaches they’ve used since the 1960’s, which often make things worse, not better. Firms have long relied on diversity training to reduce bias on the job, hiring tests and performance ratings to limit it in recruitment and promotions, and grievance systems to give employees a way to challenge managers. Those tools are designed to preempt lawsuits by policing managers’ thoughts and actions. Yet laboratory studies show that this kind of force-feeding can activate bias rather than stamp it out. As social scientists have found, people often rebel against rules to assert their autonomy. Try to coerce me to do X, Y, or Z, and I’ll do the opposite just to prove that I’m my own person.
In analyzing three decades’ worth of data from more than 800 US firms and interviewing hundreds of line managers and executives at length, we’ve seen that companies get better results when they ease up on the control tactics. It’s more effective to engage managers in solving the problem, increase their on-the-job contact with female and minority workers, and promote social accountability; the desire to look fair-minded. That’s why interventions such as targeted college recruitment, mentoring programs, self-managed teams, and task forces have boosted diversity in businesses. Some of the most effective solutions aren’t even designed with diversity in mind.
Here, we dig into the data, the interviews, and company examples to shed light on what doesn’t work and what does.
Executives favor a classic command-and-control approach to diversity because it boils expected behaviors down to dos and don’ts that are easy to understand and defend. Yet this approach also flies in the face of nearly everything we know about how to motivate people to make changes. Decades of social science research point to a simple truth; you won’t get managers on board by blaming and shaming them with rules and re-education. Let’s look at how the most common top-down efforts typically go wrong.
Do people who undergo training usually shed their biases? Researchers have been examining that question since before World War II, in nearly a thousand studies. It turns out that while people are easily taught to respond correctly to a questionnaire about bias, they soon forget the right answers. The positive effects of diversity training rarely last beyond a day or two, and a number of studies suggest that it can activate bias or spark a backlash. Nonetheless, nearly half of midsize companies use it, as do nearly all the Fortune 500.
Poor Returns on the Usual Diversity Programs. The three most popular interventions make firms less diverse, not more, because managers resist strong-arming. For instance, testing job applicants hurts women and minorities, but not because they perform poorly. Hiring managers don’t always test everyone, and hiring managers don’t interpret results consistently. This chart shows the percent change over five years in representation among managers for the three most popular diversity programs for men and women, of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds. The programs include Mandatory diversity training, Job tests, and Grievance systems.
For some demographics there was no statistical certainty of a program’s effect and results were omitted. Both genders and all ethnic groups saw decreases in representation over five years. However, for white men, no effects as a result of any diversity program were evident. Asian men saw the biggest decrease in representation among managers, which dropped 11.3% after five years in firms that used grievance systems as an intervention. The next biggest decrease in representation among managers occurred for Black men, whose representation dropped 10.2% in firms that used job tests for hiring. Among women, the biggest decrease in representation occurred for Asian women, with their representation among managers dropping 9.3% after five years of using job testing as a diversity intervention in hiring.
Many firms see adverse effects. One reason is that three-quarters use negative messages in their training. By headlining the legal case for diversity and trotting out stories of huge settlements, they issue an implied threat “Discriminate, and the company will pay the price.” We understand the temptation, that’s how we got your attention in the first paragraph, but threats, or “negative incentives,” don’t win converts.
Another reason is that about three-quarters of firms with training still follow the dated advice of the late diversity guru R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. “If diversity management is strategic to the organization,” he used to say, diversity training must be mandatory, and management has to make it clear that “if you can’t deal with that, then we have to ask you to leave.” But five years after instituting required training for managers, companies saw no improvement in the proportion of white women, Black men, and Hispanics in management, and the share of Black women actually decreased on average by 9%, while the ranks of Asian American men and women shrank by 4% to 5%. Trainers tell us that people often respond to compulsory courses with anger and resistance and many participants actually report more animosity toward other groups afterward.
But voluntary training evokes the opposite response, leading to better results. Increases of 9% to 13% in Black men, Hispanic men, and Asian American men and women in management five years out, with no decline in white or Black women. Research from the University of Toronto reinforces our findings. In one study white subjects read a brochure critiquing prejudice toward Blacks. When people felt pressure to agree with it, the reading strengthened their bias against Blacks. When they felt the choice was theirs, the reading reduced bias.
Companies too often signal that training is remedial. The diversity manager at a national beverage company told us that the top brass uses it to deal with problem groups. “If there are a number of complaints, or, God forbid, some type of harassment case leaders say, ‘Everyone in the business unit will go through it again. Most companies with training have special programs for managers. To be sure, they’re a high-risk group because they make the hiring, promotion, and pay decisions. But singling them out implies that they’re the worst culprits. Managers tend to resent that implication and resist the message.
Some 40% of companies now try to fight bias with mandatory hiring tests assessing the skills of candidates for front-line jobs. But managers don’t like being told that they can’t hire whomever they please, and our research suggests that they often use the tests selectively. Back in the 1950’s, following the postwar migration of Blacks northward, Swift & Company, Chicago meat-packers, instituted tests for supervisor and quality-checking jobs. One study found managers telling Blacks that they had failed the test and then promoting whites who hadn’t been tested. A Black machine operator reported: “I had four years at Englewood High School. I took an exam for a checker’s job. The foreman told me I failed” and gave the job to a white man who “didn’t take the exam.”
This kind of thing still happens. When we interviewed the new HR director at a West Coast food company, he said he found that white managers were making only strangers—most of them minorities—take supervisor tests and hiring white friends without testing them. “If you are going to test one person for this particular job title,” he told us, “you need to test everybody.”
But even managers who test everyone applying for a position may ignore the results. Investment banks and consulting firms build tests into their job interviews, asking people to solve math and scenario-based problems on the spot. While studying this practice, Kellogg professor Lauren Rivera played a fly on the wall during hiring meetings at one firm. She found that the team paid little attention when white men blew the math test but close attention when women and Blacks did. Because decision-makers cherry-picked results, the testing amplified bias rather than quashed it.
Companies that institute written job tests for managers – about 10% have them today – see decreases of 4% to 10% in the share of managerial jobs held by white women, African American men and women, Hispanic men and women, and Asian American women over the next five years. There are significant declines among white and Asian American women/groups with high levels of education, which typically score well on standard managerial tests. So group differences in test-taking skills don’t explain the pattern.
More than 90% of midsize and large companies use annual performance ratings to ensure that managers make fair pay and promotion decisions. Identifying and rewarding the best workers isn’t the only goal. The ratings also provide a litigation shield. Companies sued for discrimination often claim that their performance rating systems prevent biased treatment.
But studies show that raters tend to low-ball women and minorities in performance reviews. And some managers give everyone high marks to avoid hassles with employees or to keep their options open when handing out promotions. However managers work around performance systems, the bottom line is that ratings don’t boost diversity. When companies introduce them, there’s no effect on minority managers over the next five years, and the share of white women in management drops by 4%, on average.
This last tactic is meant to identify and rehabilitate biased managers. About half of midsize and large firms have systems through which employees can challenge pay, promotion, and termination decisions. But many managers – rather than change their own behavior or address discrimination by others – try to get even with or belittle the employees who complain. Among the nearly 90,000 discrimination complaints made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2015, 45% included a charge of retaliation, which suggests that the original report was met with ridicule, demotion, or worse.
Once people see that a grievance system isn’t warding off bad behavior in their organization, they may become less likely to speak up. Indeed, employee surveys show that most people don’t report discrimination. This leads to another unintended consequence. Managers who receive few complaints conclude that their firms don’t have a problem. We see this a lot in our interviews. When we talked with the vice president of HR at an electronics firm, she mentioned the widely publicized difficulties other corporations are having and added, “We have not had any of those problems. We have gone almost four years without any kind of discrimination complaint!” What’s more, lab studies show that protective measures like grievance systems lead people to drop their guard and let bias affect their decisions, because they think company policies will guarantee fairness.
Things don’t get better when firms put in formal grievance systems; they get worse. Quantitative analyses show that the managerial ranks of white women and all minority groups except Hispanic men decline by 3% to 11% in the five years after companies adopt them.
Still, most employers feel they need some sort of system to intercept complaints, if only because judges like them. One strategy that is gaining ground is the “flexible” complaint system, which offers not only a formal hearing process but also informal mediation. Since an informal resolution doesn’t involve hauling the manager before a disciplinary body, it may reduce retaliation. As we’ll, show that making managers feel accountable without subjecting them to public rebuke tends to help.
When someone’s beliefs and behavior are out of sync, that person experiences what psychologists call “cognitive dissonance.” Experiments show that people have a strong tendency to “correct” dissonance by changing either the beliefs or the behavior. So, if you prompt them to act in ways that support a particular view, their opinions shift toward that view. Ask them to write an essay defending the death penalty, and even the penalty’s staunch opponents will come to see some merits. When managers actively help boost diversity in their companies, something similar happens; they begin to think of themselves.
Diversity Programs That Get Results. Companies do a better job of increasing diversity when they forgo the control tactics and frame their efforts more positively. The most effective programs spark engagement, increase contact among different groups, or draw on people’s strong desire to look good to others. In addition, college recruitment targeting women turns recruiting managers into diversity champions, so it also helps boost the numbers for Black and Asian American men. And college recruitment targeting minorities often focuses on historically Black schools, which lifts the numbers of African American men and women. This chart shows the percent change over five years in representation among managers, broken out by the type of diversity program, for men and women of white, black, Hispanic, and Asian backgrounds. The types of diversity programs are: Voluntary training, Self-managed teams, Cross-training, College recruitment of women, College recruitment of minorities, Mentoring, Diversity task forces, and Diversity managers.
For some demographics there was no statistical certainty of a program’s effect on representation, and results were omitted. In general, women of all backgrounds saw increases in representation among managers. For white women, college recruitment targeting women, and diversity task forces, were the most effective programs, garnering 10.2% and 11.6% increases, respectively, in representation among managers after five years. For black women, mentoring and diversity task forces were the most effective programs, garnering 18% and 22.7% increases, respectively.
For Hispanic women, diversity managers and mentoring programs were the most effective, seeing increases in representation of 18.2% and 23.7%, respectively. For Asian women, having diversity task forces garnered the highest increase in representation among the groups of women, at 24.2%, followed by mentoring programs, which produced a 24% increase in their representation. For the most part, men saw increases in representation among managers as a result of all program types, with some exceptions.
The representation of Hispanic men among managers dropped by 3.9% in companies that implemented cross-training programs, and among white men, representation among managers dropped after five years in companies that implemented diversity programs of self-managed teams, cross-training, college recruitment of women, and diversity task forces. For black men, voluntary training and diversity managers were the most effective diversity programs, eliciting 13.3% and 17% increases in representation among managers, respectively.
For Hispanic men, having diversity task forces was the most effective program, producing a 12% increase in representation. For Asian men, the most effective program was diversity task forces, which produced the highest increase in representation among all the groups of men, at 30.2%, which was also the greatest increase in representation among all groups of both genders.
Take college recruitment programs targeting women and minorities. Interviews suggest that managers willingly participate when invited. That’s partly because the message is positive, “Help us find a greater variety of promising employees!” And involvement is voluntary. Executives sometimes single out managers they think would be good recruiters, but they don’t drag anyone along at gunpoint.
Managers who make college visits say they take their charge seriously. They are determined to come back with strong candidates from underrepresented groups; female engineers, for instance, or African American management trainees. Cognitive dissonance soon kicks in and managers who were wishy-washy about diversity become converts.
The effects are striking. Five years after a company implements a college recruitment program targeting female employees, the share of white women, Black women, Hispanic women, and Asian American women in its management rises by about 10%, on average. A program focused on minority recruitment increases the proportion of Black male managers by 8% and Black female managers by 9%.
Mentoring is another way to engage managers and chip away at their biases. In teaching their protégés the ropes and sponsoring them for key training and assignments, mentors help give their charges the breaks they need to develop and advance. The mentors then come to believe that their protégés merit these opportunities; whether they’re white men, women, or minorities. That is cognitive dissonance—“Anyone I sponsor must be deserving”—at work again.
While white men tend to find mentors on their own, women and minorities more often need help from formal programs. One reason, as Georgetown’s business school dean David Thomas discovered in his research on mentoring, is that white male executives don’t feel comfortable reaching out informally to young women and minority men. Yet they are eager to mentor assigned protégés, and women and minorities are often first to sign up for mentors.
Mentoring programs make companies’ managerial echelons significantly more diverse. On average they boost the representation of Black, Hispanic, and Asian American women, and Hispanic and Asian American men, by 9% to 24%. In industries where plenty of college-educated non managers are eligible to move up, like chemicals and electronics, mentoring programs also increase the ranks of white women and Black men by 10% or more.
Only about 15% of firms have special college recruitment programs for women and minorities, and only 10% have mentoring programs. Once organizations try them out, though, the upside becomes clear. Consider how these programs helped Coca-Cola in the wake of a race discrimination suit settled in 2000 for a record $193 million.
With guidance from a court-appointed external task force, executives in the North America group got involved in recruitment and mentoring initiatives for professionals and middle managers, working specifically toward measurable goals for minorities.
Even top leaders helped to recruit and mentor, and talent-sourcing partners were required to broaden their recruitment efforts. After five years, according to former CEO and chairman Neville Isdell, 80% of all mentees had climbed at least one rung in management. Both individual and group mentoring were open to all races but attracted large numbers of African Americans (who accounted for 36% of protégés). These changes brought important gains. From 2000 to 2006, African Americans’ representation among salaried employees grew from 19.7% to 23%, and Hispanics’ from 5.5% to 6.4%. And while African Americans and Hispanics respectively made up 12% and 4.9% of professionals and middle managers in 2002, just four years later those figures had risen to 15.5% and 5.9%.
This began a virtuous cycle. Today, Coke looks like a different company. This February, Atlanta Tribune magazine profiled 17 African American women in VP roles and above at Coke, including CFO Kathy Waller.
Evidence that contact between groups can lessen bias first came to light in an unplanned experiment on the European front during World War II. The US army was still segregated, and only whites served in combat roles. High casualties left General Dwight Eisenhower understaffed, and he asked for Black volunteers for combat duty. When Harvard sociologist Samuel Stouffer, on leave at the War Department, surveyed troops on their racial attitudes, he found that whites whose companies had been joined by Black platoons showed dramatically lower racial animus and greater willingness to work alongside Blacks than those whose companies remained segregated. Stouffer concluded that whites fighting alongside Blacks came to see them as soldiers like themselves first and foremost. The key, for Stouffer, was that whites and Blacks had to be working toward a common goal as equals, hundreds of years of close contact during and after slavery hadn’t dampened bias.
Business practices that generate this kind of contact across groups yield similar results. Take self-managed teams, which allow people in different roles and functions to work together on projects as equals. Such teams increase contact among diverse types of people, because specialties within firms are still largely divided along racial, ethnic, and gender lines. For example, women are more likely than men to work in sales, whereas white men are more likely to be in tech jobs and management, and Black and Hispanic men are more likely to be in production.
As in Stouffer’s combat study, working side-by-side breaks down stereotypes, which leads to more equitable hiring and promotion. At firms that create self-managed work teams, the share of white women, Black men and women, and Asian American women in management rises by 3% to 6% over five years.
Why can mentoring, self-managed teams, and cross-training increase diversity without the backlash prompted by mandatory training? One reason may be that these programs aren’t usually branded as diversity efforts. Diversity language in company policy can stress white men out, as researchers at UC Santa Barbara and the University of Washington found when they put young white men through a simulated job interview; half of them for a company that touted its commitment to diversity, and half for a company that did not. In the explicitly pro-diversity company, subjects expected discrimination against whites, showed cardiovascular distress, and did markedly worse in the taped interview.
Rotating management trainees through departments is another way to increase contact. Typically, this kind of cross-training allows people to try their hand at various jobs and deepen their understanding of the whole organization. But it also has a positive impact on diversity, because it exposes both department heads and trainees to a wider variety of people. The result, we’ve seen, is a bump of 3% to 7% in white women, Black men and women, and Asian American men and women in management.
About a third of US firms have self-managed teams for core operations, and nearly four-fifths use cross-training, so these tools are already available in many organizations. Though college recruitment and mentoring have a bigger impact on diversity; perhaps because they activate engagement in the diversity mission and create inter-group contact. Every bit helps. Self-managed teams and cross-training have had more positive effects than mandatory diversity training, performance evaluations, job testing, or grievance procedures, which are supposed to promote diversity.
The third tactic, encouraging social accountability, plays on our need to look good in the eyes of those around us. It is nicely illustrated by an experiment conducted in Israel. Teachers in training graded identical compositions attributed to Jewish students with Ashkenazic names (European heritage) or with Sephardic names (African or Asian heritage). Sephardic students typically come from poorer families and do worse in school. On average, the teacher trainees gave the Ashkenazic essays B’s and the Sephardic essays D’s. The difference evaporated, however, when trainees were told that they would discuss their grades with peers. The idea that they might have to explain their decisions led them to judge the work by its quality.
In the workplace you’ll see a similar effect. Consider this field study conducted by Emilio Castilla of MIT’s Sloan School of Management. A firm found it consistently gave African Americans smaller raises than whites, even when they had identical job titles and performance ratings. So Castilla suggested transparency to activate social accountability. The firm posted each unit’s average performance rating and pay raise by race and gender. Once managers realized that employees, peers, and superiors would know which parts of the company favored whites, the gap in raises all but disappeared.
Corporate diversity task forces help promote social accountability. CEOs usually assemble these teams, inviting department heads to volunteer and including members of underrepresented groups. Every quarter or two, task forces look at diversity numbers for the whole company, for business units, and for departments to figure out what needs attention.
After investigating where the problems are, task force members come up with solutions, which they then take back to their departments. They notice if their colleagues aren’t volunteering to mentor or showing up at recruitment events. Accountability theory suggests that having a task force member in a department will cause managers in it to ask themselves, “Will this look right?” when making hiring and promotion decisions.
Deloitte has seen how powerful social accountability can be. In 1992, Mike Cook, who was then CEO, decided to try to stanch the hemorrhaging of female associates. Half the company’s hires were women, but nearly all of them left before they were anywhere near making partner. As Douglas McCracken, CEO of Deloitte’s consulting unit at the time, later recounted in HBR, Cook assembled a high-profile task force that didn’t immediately launch a slew of new organizational policies aimed at outlawing bad behavior, but rather, relied on transparency to get results.
The task force got each office to monitor the career progress of its women and set its own goals to address local problems. When it became clear that the CEO and other managing partners were closely watching, McCracken wrote, “women started getting their share of premier client assignments and informal mentoring.” And unit heads all over the country began getting questions from partners and associates about why things weren’t changing faster. An external advisory council issued annual progress reports, and individual managers chose change metrics to add to their own performance ratings. In eight years, turnover among women dropped to the same level as turnover among men, and the proportion of female partners increased from 5% to 14%, the highest percentage among the big accounting firms. By 2015, 21% of Deloitte’s global partners were women, and in March of that year, Deloitte LLP appointed Cathy Engelbert as its CEO, making her the first woman to head a major accountancy.
Task forces are the trifecta of diversity programs. In addition to promoting accountability, they engage members who might have previously been cool to diversity projects and increase contact among the women, minorities, and white men who participate. They pay off too. On average, companies that put in diversity task forces see 9% to 30% increases in the representation of white women and of each minority group in management over the next five years.
Diversity managers boosted inclusion by creating social accountability. To see why, let’s go back to the finding of the teacher-in-training experiment, which is supported by many studies. When people know they might have to explain their decisions, they are less likely to act on bias. So simply having a diversity manager who could ask them questions prompts managers to step back and consider everyone who is qualified instead of hiring or promoting the first people who come to mind. Companies that appoint diversity managers see 7% to 18% increases in all underrepresented groups – except Hispanic men – in management in the following five years. Those are the gains after accounting for both effective and ineffective programs they put in place.
Only 20% of medium and large employers have task forces, and just 10% have diversity managers, despite the benefits of both. Diversity managers cost money, but task forces use existing workers, so they’re a lot cheaper than some of the things that fail, such as mandatory training.
Leading companies like Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, Facebook, and Google have placed big bets on accountability in the past couple of years. Expanding on Deloitte’s early example, they’re now posting complete diversity numbers for all to see. We should know in a few years if that moves the needle for them.
Strategies for controlling bias – which drive most diversity efforts – have failed spectacularly since they were introduced to promote equal opportunity. Black men have barely gained ground in corporate management since 1985. White women haven’t progressed since 2000. It isn’t that there aren’t enough educated women and minorities out there. Both groups have made huge educational gains over the past two generations. The problem is that we can’t motivate people by forcing them to get with the program and punishing them if they don’t.
The numbers sum it up. Your organization will become less diverse, not more, if you require managers to go to diversity training, try to regulate their hiring and promotion decisions, and put in a legalistic grievance system.