Ditching Diversity MythsIn the workplace, deep-level similarity is more important than surface-level diversity.
Ryan Ruffaner
10 Aug 2023
Most research on demographic diversity in the workplace revolves around the diversity of age, sex, race and ethnicity. The scientific literature calls these differences “surface-level diversity” because they are immediately observable, biological in nature, and generally immutable. Some people believe these characteristics are reasonable proxies for underlying psychological characteristics and in some cases this may be true. For example, older people tend to feel more satisfied with their lives than their younger counterparts, and women tend to rank higher than men on the personality trait of agreeableness. However, given the huge variation within individual psychology, there are also many instances where you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Furthermore, not all diversity research is equally valuable. For example, some of the literature on surface-level diversity includes organizational tenure and functional background in the same category as age, sex, and race/ethnicity. This is a mistake. It is not possible to determine how long someone has worked in an organization just by looking at them, especially considering how frequently many people move between jobs and companies these days. Nor is it possible to guess a person’s functional background in this way—a uniform can be worn and removed, but this is not possible with age, sex, race, or ethnicity. Functional background is more closely related to deep-level diversity, not surface-level diversity, because it influences characteristics like opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and values more than our age, sex, or race/ethnicity.
Why does this matter? Because including deep-level variables in experiments designed to measure the effects of surface-level variables like diversity in age, sex, race, and ethnicity inevitably skews the results. For example, an academic article’s abstract may say that surface-level diversity is positively correlated with team performance. Activists and media outlets may therefore assume that the variables responsible for this correlation are sex, age, or race and ethnicity, and encourage race- and sex-based hiring/promotions. In fact, it may be that diversity of organizational tenure (mixing seasoned professionals with newer people with fresh perspectives, and vice versa) or functional background was responsible for higher performance. Consequently, we must treat diversity research with caution.
The research that focuses purely on true surface-level diversity isn’t much better. As David A. Harrison, Kenneth H. Price, and Myrtle P. Bell point out in their literature review and experiment on these two types of diversity (more on this later), the effects of commonly studied surface-level diversity characteristics have been inconsistent across studies, and even within studies. In fact, the findings of surface-level diversity studies have been so inconsistent that they differ on whether or not surface-level diversity has any effect on other variables. Some studies even show that surface-level diversity has negative impacts on factors like organizational commitment and job satisfaction, while others show a positive impact. Curiously, these inconsistencies are particularly strong on the effects of race and sex, the two variables that people tend to be most vocal about.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2023/08/10/ditching-diversity-myths/
