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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.

The general problem here is that the "merit" in meritocracy needs to be measured in some quantitative way. It's not an objective or absolute quantity. Organizations or teams that have a blind spot are often not aware that they have a blind spot and hence they won't be able to fill it.

Diversity helps you to broaden your definition of merit and create more balanced value system

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 a Syrian immigrant, the Kennedys were Irish, Barack Obama mixed race, and 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.

As the other answers mention, there are potentially benefits from a more diverse team that, although they could theoretically be picked up as part of a measure of merit , in practice frequently aren't.

Aside from any actual benefits to the company though, from the perspective of people monitoring hiring practices diversity is much easier to measure than merit. This makes life much easier for HR and middle management types, who can report a 20% increase in new hire diversity as a win rather more easily than they can report a 20% increase in new hire merit. Since these people tend to be involved in advising on hiring policies, diversity related policies have a tendency to emerge.

I work in a big IT company (100.000+ employee) and I am a racial minority. Here is what I was told from an HR representative when I was promoted as a manager:

We need to hire smart and talented people. Smart and talented people come can come from any background, including diverse gender, diverse sexualities, diverse skin color, diverse level of disability, etc...

If a division of the company turns out to be seen a toxic by a given demographic, we loose the ability to hire from this demographic.

For exemple, if you let lewd jokes, harassment, belittlement create a toxic environment for women, we loose 50% of our hiring prospect, which will result in having less choice from where to select talented people. As a result, you will have to work with dummies.

So, be open to diversity and work with smart people, or else you will have to work with dummies.

What I find funny is that I had to be promoted manager to ear this sensible argument. As long as I was a junior, all HR gave me as a justification was the usual BS ("diversity is cool, mmh 'kay? Don't be bad"). Beeing a minority, I value diversity, but like you I was doubtful, as if a company whose primary objective is to make money would care...

Just an idea: if you have a non-divers clientele (all customers being of the same/similar background), then diversity might not bring a lot of advantages (at least what customer satisfaction is concerned).

However, if your customer base is more divers (different backgrounds), then the presence of similar backgrounds in your company might foresee possible issues/questions the customer will have, which will make it easier and faster to respond to any customer demands.

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?

Human beings, including "unbiased people" are capable of believing nearly anything for any reason. But when people form any given belief, they don't typically change it unless it is shown to be demonstrably wrong in some way that is costly to ignore.

Belief in diversity's benefits is a relatively non-costly belief for HR personnel, and those benefits are difficult to measure objectively. If the benefits of diverse hiring practices don't actually exist, the effort in seeking additional diversity doesn't negatively impact the company much or at all.

Consider that top companies like Google still have 80% male development teams because that's who they can find, even after spending lots of time and money to try to hire more women. It's not like if a software company can only find 3 white dudes no matter how hard it tries, it won't eventually hire one of the white dudes instead of keep the position open forever.

You are assuming that when you are installing a system of true meritocracy will make any focus on diversity unnecessary, since skill does not depend on race or gender. Since skill actually does not depend on race and gender, this assumption sounds good in theory, but it does not hold up in the real world.

You can install a system of "true meritocracy" in your company and try to inforce it with all kind of measures, but the truth is that it is impossible to build such a bubble and completely isolate it from the real world.

In our society there are many ways how people can be disadvantaged by race, gender, wealth, social group etc. Here are some examples:

• A woman who has kids is working on a part-time contract outperforms her coworkers on full-time contract, but her manager, whose wife stays at home with the kids, subconsciously (or consciously for that matter) feels that she can not fully focus on her job because "she also has to take care of her children" or he feels "sorry for the kids who need their mother". If she looks for a new job, she will do so from a position lower than warranted by her actual performance.


• A black person is not graded fairly in his oral exam because he happened to come across an examiner who secretly holds racist views.


• A smart kid from a poor family does not get good support at school, because her/his parents are busy to bring food on the table. It is expected hrom her/him to quickly find a paying job, because the family can not afford to maintan her/him in a higher eductation. At the same time a less gifted rich child will get all the support she/he needs by a paid tutor to attain good grades and will be supported financially by her/his parents during higher education.

All these people are at a disvantantage in a recruitment process that does not factor in the systemic effect of race, gender and other bias that is still present in our society.

You can even go further and say that only if you make sure that the composition of your workforce matches the one of society, you can truly install a meritocratic system. Structures tend to perpetuate themselves. A less diverse workforce will tend to remain like this, while on the other hand, a more diverse workforce will also stay more diverse.

When your company is as diverse as society on all hierarchy levels, then it will be visible to everyone that anyone can make it to any position in the company. Only then you can truly hire people only based on their skills, because everyone, the hirer and the hiree will be aware that other non-related factors will not matter. Until then you will have to compensate for structural disadvantages of some applicants in your hiring process. The goal can not be to hire for diversity forever, but only when and as much as structural disadvantages are reflected in the company's workforce.