The Overton window has moved: it’s now OK to criticise DEI initiatives. But as always, shifts in public perception and discourse resemble a pendulum: they shift too far one way, then over-correct in the opposite direction.
My views on DEI are mundane, boring, and obvious to most people — as most centrist positions inevitably are:
Diversity is worth pursuing, and the debate on equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome is somewhat irrelevant
That said, diversity is costly, and brushing this under the carpet does no-one any good
If you really care about diversity in your workforce, you should invest disproportionately in hiring at the entry level
A lot of the ideas that are supposed to help with DEI are hindering it
Diversity is worth pursuing…
… for two reasons. First, diversity of thought leads to identifying a wider set of customer problems to solve, and to considering a wider set of solutions. People on the right like to argue that this is true of diversity of thought, and that the left’s definition of diversity does not actually encompass different view points. But diversity in race, ethnicity, socio-economic background, religion, and other such characteristics certainly does result in diversity of thought.
Second, even if diversity is not beneficial in itself, its absence means that companies are missing out on talented candidates. If all your workforce comes from one demographic segment, you’re not hiring the superstars of the other segments.
Many on the right agree in principle with this argument, and target their criticism of DEI on the fact that DEI proponents aim for equality of outcome and not opportunity: they (the right) say, ‘of course we should make sure all talented candidates are considered; but if, in the end, the most talented candidates happen to come from one demographic segment, then there’s nothing wrong with hiring from that segment only.’ Which is true — but it’s very suspicious when this keeps happening in practice! In reality, drastic imbalances in equality of outcome suggest inequality of opportunity, and since the latter is hard to measure, I think it’s fair enough to be using the former as a proxy.
(Some people will argue that there are innate differences among demographic segments that account for different outcomes. It’s possible — but I'd argue that this argument hasn’t held up very well from a historical perspective. Every dominant group in every society in history has argued that it’s dominant because of its innate superiority, often to be toppled when conditions have changed.)
There are costs to diversity
It is idealistic to suggest that diversity yields benefits without any costs. Free lunches are rare. The costs of diversity should be acknowledged and discussed, not so as to oppose diversity efforts, but so that organisations can mitigate them.
Diversity results in friction. This can be mundane — people can literally struggle to understand each other. When I worked in China, many Chinese people told me they struggled to understand British accents (and found my own Greek accent easier!); hilariously, they also said that British people, to try and make themselves understood, would exaggerate their native accent, making matters worse. This sounds silly and superficial, but it can be a problem in large companies, especially with remote working. And this assumes people can speak the same language to begin with! My son attends a state school in London, where many children do not have English as a first language; it’s often happened that we’ve attended a school performance where some parents didn’t show up, because they didn’t understand the performance was on that date.
(There’s also the much-discussed topic of cultural differences; I’ve argued in the past that these are often blamed for what’s really social ineptitude, and I stand by that argument, but differences do exist.)
Even when diversity does not result in outright friction, it makes cohesion harder. People from the same culture find it easier to bond over the common knowledge, memes, and traditions of their in-group. Members of an in-group are often oblivious of the extent to which outsiders are bewildered by the group’s frames of reference. These can range from the innocuous (consider the following, whose meaning may be obvious to you but totally obscure to others: ‘starter for ten’; ‘ballpark’; ‘office hours’; ‘close of play’; ‘batting average’) to the kind of language that can make outsiders feel like they don’t belong (I was once asked by a colleague whether I agreed that Vienna has ‘the best ball season in Europe’.)
Diversity also makes policy-making harder because it lowers the likelihood of consensus; for instance, an older poll found that over half of all British Muslims think homosexuality should be illegal (compared to only 5% of the wider population). (By the way, it is hard to find more recent surveys breaking down attitudes to gay marriage by religion, which I suspect is exactly because people are reluctant to highlight the tensions inherent in diversity).
All these can be addressed, but only if they are first acknowledged.
Hire at the entry level
I’ve talked before about the merits of entry-level hiring. Another benefit to add to a long list is that hiring disproportionately at juniour levels is likely to help increase diversity. It is a sad fact that senior executives are disproportionately white males; this is not the case with university graduates. So hiring people straight out of uni gives you access to a wider pool of diverse candidates.
One of the companies I’ve worked for had a big emphasis on DEI — on paper. I asked HR for data on applicants, and showed to some senior leaders that by hiring more graduates we’d be able to interview way more people from different backgrounds. Sadly, this went nowhere — there was a perception that training graduates was harder and more onerous. And so, despite the benefits it’d have on DEI, my suggestion was not taken up.
Of course, hiring at the entry-level can cause another headache for organisations as far as DEI is concerned, which brings me to the next point…
Some efforts to support DEI have the opposite effect
Another reason companies are reluctant to hire more diverse candidates at an entry level is that doing so will make them look worse: it’s becoming increasingly common (and some times mandated by regulators) for companies to publish pay statistics. And of course, if you hire more juniour people from a particular minority, the average pay for that minority will go down. This incentivises companies to hire fewer people from minorities.
Similarly, because companies can be sued if they’re proven to be discriminatory, they have very strong incentives to never try and find out for themselves whether they are so! I’ve been very active in recruitment in all the companies I’ve worked for; and I’ve often thought about how great it would be if companies tracked their interviewers’ data over time: is a particular interviewer disproportionately likely to hire men over women? Or to reject members of a particular socio-economic or racial background? But, what would happen if a company did this, and found out that on average it discriminates against a particular minority? It would be sued to oblivion, and the PR mess alone would be catastrophic.
There’s no obvious solution to this; even if there were no regulation to restrict companies, public perception and the lack of nuance in these discussions (no-one cares about the details of reported pay gaps; everyone focused on the headline figure) are sufficient to disincentivise companies from doing the right thing.
(A naive solution might be more regulation: ‘force companies to run this kind of analysis on hiring’. But this will again create perverse incentives — a company that has to report on the success rate of different applicants will naturally aim to cast a smaller net. If you only interview black candidates from Harvard, their success rate will go up — but this will penalise people who didn’t go to Harvard.)