Diversity and shaped perception

An interesting couple of experiments reported in Diversity Is in the Eye of the Beholder by Bettina Chang.

Is a city council with five white members and one black member diverse? Considering the current debates on racial representation in politics and policing in Ferguson, Missouri, it’s a sensitive question.

The answer, researchers find, depends not only on if you are white or a minority race, but which minority race you belong to.

[snip]

In other words, if a team did not contain at least one member of their own racial group, the participants considered it less racially diverse. This “in-group representation effect” was stronger for blacks than for Asian Americans.

In business circles, there is, in general, a far more sophisticated understanding and investment in diversity than in academic circles, I presume because there are real world consequences to businesses. Diversity in the business community is better understood to be diversity of knowledge, behaviors and experience rather than the academic interpretation of diversity as racial or gender mix.

That's not to say that most big businesses don't go through the motions of diversity displays in the academic terms, but it is usually "diversity" for marketing and brand building purposes rather than diversity for making better decisions and better outcomes.

Academics have been very reluctant to explore whether there is evidence to support their contention that racial and gender diversity actually yield better decisions and outcomes. The evidence is decidedly mixed, principally because the flow of causation is not established. Most big successful growing companies start out non-diverse and as they grow and marketing and brand become more important, they invest in the appearances of diversity without the core decision-making process participants becoming more diverse. Consequently, because the two events are correlated (growth and increasing diversity) it is usually assumed without evidence that the latter causes the former.

This weakness in argument is by no means confined to the issue of diversity. It has a long and broad history. Tom Peters' longstanding bestseller of the mid 1980s, In Search of Excellence, had this same issue of unvalidated directionality of causation. They looked at dozens of successful companies and then identified eight attributes they had substantially in common: bias for action, staying close to the customer, mix of autonomy and entrepreneurship, people based productivity, hands on management, value driven, strategically focused, lean staff, and balanced loose-tight properties (i.e. maintaining a dynamic balance between centralized/decentralized organization). The assumption was that these eight practices caused the company's success. The subsequent bankruptcy, scandals and acquisition of many of these companies by others made it somewhat clearer that the causation of success was different than the observed attributes. In other words, some of the observed attributes were the baubles of success, not the cause of it.

While there is a dearth of research on whether and to what degree theoretical diversity drives improvement in outcomes, this new research begins to scratch away at some of the host of issues which plague the field. In this particular case, it addresses the issue of perceived diversity. Perhaps this is marginally related to the issue I have posted about regarding the lambasting of tech companies for lack of racial and gender diversity when in fact less than 30% of their employees are white males. The accusation of lack of diversity can only be made if you conflate Asians with Whites which seems an extreme form of shaped perception but perhaps that is it.