How Organizations Can Best Communicate Their Commitment to Diversity

Introduction

As organizations become more aware of the importance of diversity as a tool to attract and retain employees, more of them are actively choosing to communicate why they celebrate diversity. Companies frequently express their commitment to diversity by outlining the reasons why diversity is important through their organizational diversity cases. There are two general forms of diversity cases: the ‘business case’ and the ‘fairness case.’ The ‘business case’ utilizes instrumental rhetoric and argues that diversity is crucial because it enhances organizational performance and ultimately boosts profits. The ‘fairness case’ uses non-instrumental rhetoric and maintains that diversity is inherently valuable and does not need to be tied to a company’s financial gain.

Despite the positive messaging on diversity that is highlighted by the business case, in practice it may actually convey a form of social identity threat (the concern that one will be devalued based on one’s identity) to its audience. Most notably, this occurs among job-seekers from underrepresented backgrounds. When reading the business case message for diversity, individuals might be more likely to believe that they will be devalued, as their contributions at the organization will be interpreted and evaluated through the lens of their identity. Yet, among the Fortune 500 companies who have an organizational diversity case, about 80% of them adopt the business case rather than the fairness case. It is therefore important to further examine the value of organizational diversity rhetoric using a theory-driven empirical approach. 

Dr. Oriane A. M. Georgeac is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Yale School of Management where she conducts research on how people respond to organizations’ messages about diversity. Dr. Aneeta Rattan is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at London Business School where she investigates how to improve belonging, achievement, and equity in organizations.

Methods and Findings

The authors conduct several experiments to test their hypotheses that: (1) exposure to the business case for diversity lowers underrepresented job seekers’ sense of belonging and (2) a lower expected sense of belonging will lead to lower interest in joining an organization. These hypotheses are tested using a between-subjects experimental design with groups who are marginalized due to their sexual orientation, gender, and race. The main findings in the study are as follows:

• Being presented with a business case for diversity results in lower expectations of inclusion among LGBTQ+ professionals compared to when a fairness case for diversity is deployed within the organization.
• Exposure to a business case of diversity instead of a fairness case leads to both a lower anticipated feeling of belonging and a greater anticipation of rejection among female job searchers in STEM fields. 
• African American students perceive greater social identity threat and more profound feelings of being depersonalized when they read a business case for diversity rather than a fairness case.

The results confirm the authors’ initial theory that organizations who employ business cases for diversity actually undermine their own goals of recruiting employees from underrepresented backgrounds. Across several distinct categories of job seekers, the business case caused significantly more detriment to their views of the organization in question.

Conclusions

There are several theoretical implications of the study. Previous research on social identity threat has generally focused on negative cues (such as the presence of negative stereotypes), but diversity cases – both business and fairness cases – are ostensibly positive cues. As a result, there is potential for future exploration of other positive phenomena that yield negative effects. Additionally, traditional research on social identity threat has focused on deeply entrenched structures, systems, and norms as its root causes. This study shows, however, that the presence of a diversity case, also identified as a cause of social identity threat, is more immediate and susceptible to change. There may be more opportunities to analyze and resolve similar sources of social identity threat. 

Practically, the findings of this study indicate that organizations ought to reject the use of the business case when explaining their commitment to diversity. Instead, the authors suggest that organizations should emphasize the importance of diversity without any justification, signaling that diversity is inherently embedded within the organization’s core values.

Diversity structures can create illusions of fairness

Introduction

​​Most organizations use diversity structures including targeted recruitment and promotion, diversity training, committees, and managers to promote diversity and create a positive environment for underrepresented groups. These structures may, however, create a mere “illusion of fairness.” The authors conducted several experiments using four types of diversity structures across several forms of discrimination to test the following hypotheses: 

• Hypothesis 1: The mere presence of organizational diversity structures may cause high-status group members to perceive those organizations to be more procedurally fair despite evidence that underrepresented groups have been unfairly disadvantaged within these organizations.
• Hypothesis 2: The “illusion of fairness” results in high-status group members legitimizing the status quo by becoming less sensitive to discrimination.
• Hypothesis 3: The “illusion of fairness” results in high-status group members reacting more harshly towards underrepresented group members who assert discrimination.

Evidence suggests that organizations can use diversity structures to promote the appearance of egalitarianism without any evidence. For instance, an examination of over 1,000 federal civil rights legal decisions over 35 years found that judges used the mere presence of diversity structures as evidence of compliance with civil rights law, rarely questioning whether organizations actually provided protection or fairness. Moreover, the Supreme Court ruled that organizations could be absolved of discriminatory charges if the employee was aware of an organization’s diversity structures but did not use them. These findings and rulings are problematic in the absence of empirical evidence on the actual efficacy of these structures. A rare 30-year-long study of over 700 organizations found that some diversity structures were associated with decreased racial diversity because complying with diversity-related pressure can decrease support for diversity and increase prejudice. Since many organizations in the United States use diversity structures that are untested and ineffective in reducing bias and increasing diversity, this study is an important step towards examining their effectiveness in increasing diversity, promoting equity, or reducing bias.

Cheryl R. Kaiser is the Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. Ines Jurcevic, also at the University of Washington, serves as the Assistant Professor at the Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. Laura M. Brady is the Associate Research Scientist and the Executive Director of the Research for Indigenous Social Action and Equity (RISE) Center at the University of Michigan. Brenda Major is a Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California Santa Barbara, Tessa L. Dover is the Assistant Professor of Applied Social Psychology at Portland State University, and Jenessa R. Shapiro is the Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of California Los Angeles. 

Methods and Findings

The experiments in this study ultimately suggest that the presence of diversity structures in an organization causes high-status group members to automatically assume that members of underrepresented groups are treated more fairly. The presumption of procedural fairness leads to the underestimation of discrimination and negative reactions towards those who claim discrimination. The methods and findings across each of the experiments are outlined below: 

Experiment 1 – Do Diversity Structures Create an Illusion of Fairness?

Methods: The experiment studies the impact of diversity structures on perceptions of fairness by inviting 245 white American participants to learn about a company by reading background information, the diversity or mission statement, and the company’s promotion demographics. Some participants read that minorities and whites received promotions and equal rates, while some read that white employees were promoted three times as often as minoritized employees. Participants also viewed a fabricated New York Times article describing a Black employee who sued the organization for plausible, but not certain racial discrimination. Next, participants completed a five-item survey asking about their perception of the company’s fairness toward minorities.

Results: The experiment provided support for the “illusion of fairness” hypothesis, finding that participants did not see unequal promotion practices as evidence that the company was unfair towards minorities. Instead, they assumed that employees may have had different qualifications that justified unequal promotion practices. This issue was addressed in the next experiment. 

Experiment 2 – Do Diversity Structures Lead White Men to Legitimize Sex Discrimination in Hiring? 

Methods: This experiment examined the implications of the “illusion of fairness” through sixty-six white men participants, who self-identified as high social status and did not associate themselves or their groups with the concept of diversity. Participants read background information on a company that required all managers to complete either a “Fostering Employee Success” or “Fostering Women’s Success” training. Participants then summarized the mission statement and examined applicants with distinctly female or distinctly male names for a client manager position. Data on applicants’ work experience and qualifications were also included and matched across sexes, so that for every male applicant, there was a female applicant with the same credentials. Participants were then shown a “short list” of applicants selected for interviews among which 70 percent of participants were male despite the equal credentials across sexes. After reviewing the short list, participants were surveyed on their support for women seeking judicial litigation to address discrimination and their overall perception of procedural justice for women. 

Results: Experiment 2 found that the presence of a gender-specific training program caused men to express less support for litigating what was objectively an unjust outcome for women. This study eliminated the effects of assumptions about varying levels of credentials from Experiment 1. 

Experiment 3 – Do Diversity Structures Cause White Men to Legitimize Sex Discrimination in Salaries 

Methods: Thirty-nine white male undergraduate students from the University of California, Santa Barbara between the ages of 18 and 23 were randomly assigned to read about a company that either had a diversity statement and training programs focused on women and minorities or a mission statement and generic diversity training. Next, they were asked to evaluate the company’s managerial promotion and pay practices by reviewing personnel information that indicated that women earned 81 percent of men at the same company holding tenure and qualifications to be constant. Participants then assessed procedural fairness and discerned if there was sex discrimination in the company. 

Results: Men who read that the company had a diversity statement and specific trainings rated the company to be more procedurally fair and were significantly less likely to say that sex discrimination occurred compared to men in the control group. 

Experiment 4 – Do Diversity Awards Cause White Men to Legitimize Sexism? 

Methods: Sixty-one white male participants read an excerpt adapted from a New York Times article describing a class action sex discrimination lawsuit against Novartis Pharmaceutical Corporation for paying women less than men and denying promotions, especially women who became pregnant or had children. Participants in the control group were not made aware that the company was named one of the 100 best companies in the U.S. by Working Mother magazine, a credential influenced by internally-provided policies and data with minimal external validation. The participants were asked to indicate the extent to which the plaintiffs’ case was valid and their perceptions of  procedural justice for women. 

Results: The presence of a diversity structure caused these high-status group members to view the organization to be fairer and to perceive the plaintiff’s discrimination claim as less valid. Since participants read about an actual sex discrimination case, findings may characterize how people perceive and react to discrimination cases in everyday life. 

Experiment 5 – Do Diversity Policies Create Animosity Toward Discrimination Claimants? 

Methods: Participants were 150 white adults between 18 to 81 years of age and composed of 62 percent female and 38 percent male. Participants were randomly assigned to read about a company with either a mission or diversity statement. Next, they read a fabricated New York Times article describing a lawsuit against the company by a Black employee. Participants then reported their assessment of the plaintiff’s discrimination claim. 

Results: The presence of diversity structures led white individuals to regard minoritized employees’ discrimination claims as less valid. It also made them more likely to dislike and derogate a minoritized employee who brought discrimination claims.

Conclusions

This study demonstrated how individuals and organizations may use the presence of diversity structures as indicators of equity, even if these structures have not produced evidence of equitable outcomes. This research, therefore, encourages individuals and organizations to be vigilant of the “illusion of fairness” and use data to assess the efficacy of organizational practice. This research also emphasizes the need for legal institutions to recognize discrimination and not discount discrimination claims brought by underrepresented groups. 

Future research should examine these phenomena within actual organizations (e.g., corporations, social organizations) rather than hypothetical conditions and explore the role of the biases across different departments and specializations (e.g., human resource personnel) within an organization. Since the study relied on self-reported responses, future research should also explore whether perceptions observed in these experiments translate to actual behavior towards underrepresented groups who claim discrimination.

The study does not imply that diversity structures cannot be effective or that they should be eliminated. Instead, diversity structures are an important acknowledgement that discrimination and prejudice exist and should be alleviated by using evidence-based diversity structures to create a more just environment for underrepresented groups. 

Implicit Bias: A Review of the Research

Introduction

Often, our intentions conflict with how we behave. These gaps between our intentions and actions can influence many social issues, including discrimination. For example, an organization may espouse racial equity but hire a white candidate over an equally qualified candidate of color. In response to disparities caused by unintentionally biased behavior, some researchers have suggested a solution: change automatic mental processes, then behavior influenced by those processes will change. Researchers have been particularly interested in “implicit measures” and “explicit measures.” Implicit measures are often associated with automatic processes, whereas explicit measures are often associated with deliberate processes. For example, an implicit measure refers to how long it takes someone to classify the words “good” or “bad” when preceded by the word “flower,” while an explicit measure refers to how someone rates flowers on a scale of good to bad.

In this study, Forscher et al. synthesized hundreds of studies to investigate how effective different approaches were in changing implicit measures. Their analysis was driven by six central questions, including: which approaches to changing implicit measures are most influential, and how do changes in implicit measures correspond with changes in behavior? In the first large-scale quantitative analysis of research on change in implicit measures, Forscher et al. found that implicit measures can be changed, but the type of approach used to change implicit measures mattered greatly. They also found little evidence that changes in implicit measures translated into changes in explicit measures and behavior. 

Seven researchers contributed to this publication, and Patrick S. Forscher and Calvin K. Lai are joint first authors. Dr. Forscher is a Research Scientist at Université Grenoble Alpes, and Dr. Lai is an Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and chairs the Scientific Advisory Committee at Project Implicit. The study’s other authors—Jordan R. Axt, Charles R. Ebersole, Michelle Herman, Patricia G. Devine, and Brian A. Nosek—have extensive experience conducting and coordinating research on implicit bias and implicit social cognition.

Methods and Findings

To compare many different procedures that aim to influence implicit measures, the researchers imported a technique from the medical sciences called multivariate network meta-analysis. Since meta-analysis requires careful consideration of which studies are relevant to the research question, the researchers set a number of inclusion criteria. For example, the researchers excluded studies that were not written in English, and experimental procedures had to fit into a single procedure category to be included. Researchers created procedure categories iteratively to capture the breadth of approaches in the literature. The researchers also focused on randomized studies, which gave them an opportunity to go beyond correlational evidence and examine whether procedures that attempt to change implicit measures also produce change in explicit measures. Their final sample represented 87,419 participants and included 492 studies. More than half of the articles under study were published in 2011 or later, one-third were published from 2006-2010, and the remaining articles were published between 1995-2005. 

The main findings were:

• Implicit measures can be changed, but the effects are often relatively weak. 
• Approaches that changed implicit measures the most were those that invoked goals or motivations (such as the goal to weaken bias), associated sets of concepts (such as strengthening or weakening associations), or taxed mental resources (such as completing mentally effortful tasks during the implicit task). 
• Approaches that changed implicit measures the least were those that induced threat (such as threatening to put one’s integrity at risk), affirmation (such as giving feedback that a participant is moral or unbiased), or specific moods/emotions (such as anger or disgust). 
• Evidence from bias tests suggested that implicit effects could be inflated relative to their true population values. 

• Generally, the approaches under study produced trivial changes in behavior. Procedures changed explicit measures less consistently and to a smaller degree than implicit measures. 
• Changes in implicit measures did not mediate changes in explicit measures or behavior. 

Conclusions

The researchers described limitations in the studies’ generalizability. For example, most studies were conducted with samples whose demographic traits (students, mostly white and female) strongly resemble the make-up of American introductory psychology courses. Although the samples’ gender composition was not associated with the size of effects, both the racial composition of the samples and whether the samples were drawn from college student populations were. In future studies, the authors recommend directly testing whether effects are generalizable to other populations since combating social problems like racial discrimination requires broader sampling and exploration of how problems operate across settings. 

The research raised theoretical and empirical puzzles for the authors. To reconcile possible explanations for their findings, the researchers recommend developing a new paradigm. Ideally, the paradigm would involve an approach that produces a clear causal impact on the automatic associations underlying implicit measures, across multiple domains. The researchers recommend starting with domains in which implicit, explicit, and behavioral measures are more intercorrelated, such as political preferences, which would enable high-powered investigations. 

For practitioners seeking to address problems presumed to be caused by automatic associations, the results of this research present a challenge, since there was little evidence that change in implicit measures will result in changes in explicit measures or behavior. This is particularly true for the domains of intergroup bias, health psychology, and clinical psychology; results suggest that current interventions attempting to change implicit measures in these domains will not consistently change behavior. The authors note that innovations may yet reveal stronger evidence for the causal importance of implicit associations, and they stated their hope that researchers take their findings as a challenge to advance our understanding of human cognition.