Ygthkb

I'm hoping my question is less broad than this one. I work in tech and see many emails about diversity from our upper management.

In some sense, I can see this being used as a PR tactic: management wants the company to look diverse because the shareholders care about the public image of the company and don't want it to look like some kind of exclusionary club... but how can one know if motivations for diversity and inclusion are anything more than a PR move? As far as I can tell, this is unknowable.

Moreover, assuming a company had no need for PR (maybe a large, private company with no real media presence,) would the policy of diversity and inclusion actually have any benefits over using raw meritocratic measurements in interviews? Meritocracy or a "competence hierarchy" does a fine job in allowing a person's performance to qualify him/her for a position - so why would diversity policies be needed to "augment" or replace this?

Note that I am not assuming that the recruiting process is done by biased people who only want to surround themselves with people who look alike - I am specifically asking why do unbiased people believe that some (non-PR) utility would be provided to their companies by hiring a more diverse staff instead of simply relying on meritocracy itself?

*I have heard that racial/gender diversity provides a company with more "cognitive diversity" - but is such an idea valid? Do recruiters actually believe in a "latino way of thinking" or a "female way of thinking" as if they were trying to create a company culture using individuals as recipe ingredients? In my mind, it is stereotypical to judge an individual as a member of a group without knowing them personally.. but perhaps I have failed to grasp the concept of "cognitive diversity"? Thanks in advance.

Here's a Harvard Business Review study on why diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams.

Diverse teams are more innovative and focus on facts better than homogeneous teams. However, it's not as simple as throwing a bunch of different people together and hoping that things work out, as this article points out.

Now if you're interested in something beyond abstract notions of "productivity" and why diversity matters, look at this. It's a soap dispenser that doesn't dispense soap to people who aren't white because a team of white people never thought to test it on skin tones apart from theirs. Don't be that team.

I work on an amazing and very diverse team. I'm better because of the diversity in my team (I get to engage with people of different skill levels, from different perspectives, with different priorities, etc.) When building teams, looking entirely for a stack of uniformly excellent 10X engineers will be both costly and counterproductive. We focused on building a 10X team, as described in this article, and we did. I'm extremely happy on my team.

I think Glen did a great job explaining the why of diversity so let me take a different perspective.

Do diversity and inclusion actually have any benefits over using raw meritocratic measurements in interviews?

I'd argue that in a perfect world they lead to the exact same outcome. That skills are perfectly distributed and so are opportunities.

But the world is not perfect and so opportunities are not evenly distributed and neither are skills distributed in the same way as people's talents, simply because you need experience and practice to get the most out of raw talent.

So companies know that to attract the most talented, driven crowd you need to think of peoples background

Steve Jobs's dad was Syrian immigrant, the Kennedys were irish, Barack Obama mixed race, Sergey Brin (google) was born in Russia.

Companies should be terrified that they could be missing out on people like that because they might have a background that is hard to recognize.