Diversity-Validity Tradeoff

Being a cognitive dabbler has its drawbacks but also its small pleasures. Among my interests are 1) which are the most important factors in life outcome success and to what degree under which constraints. I have come up with Knowledge, Experience, Skills, Values, Behaviors, Motivation, Capability (IQ and physical attributes), and Personality. 2) The startling aversion of some intellectuals with regard to the most empirical data (IQ again being the classic example). 3) Freedom, Civil Society, Economic Effectiveness, and Group/Cultural Integrity can be reconciled with one another.

One area that interlinks these three topics is the role of compelled diversity and affirmative action. Noble objective of ensuring that everyone has an equal opportunity but almost certainly the wrong diagnosis as to why there are disparate outcomes. More fundamentally, coerced diversity actions are incompatible with free citizens, civil/egalitarian society, and economic effectiveness. It is also incompatible with other, non-race definitions of diversity. I'ts a hot mess as a topic.

And for all the reading and thinking I have done on the topic for a decade or more, I don't think I have ever come across the named field of research which directly researches this - Diversity-Validity Tradeoff. From The Diversity-Validity Dilemma: Why Personality?.

The diversity-validity dilemma concerns the tradeoff between selecting valid predictors of employee performance while minimizing adverse impact and selecting a diverse workforce. In a perfect world, organizations could focus solely on using any selection tool at their disposal for identifying job applicants who are most likely to be high performers. However, some of the most valid predictors of performance are often associated with the greatest differences in scores between gender and racioethnic subgroups (Pyburn, Ployhart, & Kravitz, 2008).

Has a couple of tables on various tests in terms of their validity (to what degree does the attribute associate with desired performance) and variance (to what degree are there persistent differences on this measure between men and women and between whites and blacks.

On the one hand, I am surprised I have never heard of the field, on the other I am delighted to discover interesting research and knowledge, and yet on the other hand, I cannot imagine and much more polarizing field.