3 ms·
If you want to convince people it is in their own best interest to invest significantly in diversity, it's not likely the intro to this article will cut it for
by ve55 10y ago
If you want to convince people it is in their own best interest to invest significantly in diversity, it's not likely the intro to this article will cut it for most.
The first paper mentions that they only found a correlation, however contradicts themselves in attempting to turn this into causation, despite mentioning that correlation != causation: "While correlation does not equal causation (greater gender and ethnic diversity in corporate leadership doesn’t automatically translate into more profit), the correlation does indicate that when companies commit themselves to diverse leadership, they are more successful."
It doesn't seem like this was checked for backwards-causation (companies may be more likely to start prioritizing diversity when they are succeeding, but not when they are failing), among many other potential confounding variables, and it seems that they were very intent on trying to prove their outcome regardless of what kind of data they had, where the article starts out with "We know intuitively that diversity matters. It’s also increasingly clear that it makes sense in purely business terms." I didn't check everything from the second link, but this appears to be a very common pattern.
The third link attempts to appeal to the same sense, however goes much further, stating: "it was not “diversity” (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team’s intelligence, but simply having more women." This would seem to prove far too much, and is obviously not a generalizable result unless you sincerely believe that replacing all men with women will make your company perform better. I'm unable to view the full text or data from this paper due to the paywall.
If you're concerned about the proportion of groups such as women in tech, the right time to get them interested is when they are very young. Not during or after college. With a baseline of significantly more men in tech, you cannot reasonably expect to achieve figures such as a 1:1 ratio of female to male employees. With that said, the author seems to be focusing more on problems after people enter the workplace. There may be a lot of issues here, but I think solutions need to focus on deeper underlying problems such as culture, rather than single bottleneck processes such as promotions (and that which leads up to them).