Diversity at Work: It Matters

by Latasha Willis and Donna Ladd
December 21, 2011

In a piece called "Racism And Meritocracy" on techcrunch.com, Eric Ries talks about research on musical orchestras in which musicians auditioned behind a screen. No surprise, sadly: The screen yielded a more diverse orchestra with skill the only factor; without the screen, the orchestras were whiter.

Ries offers reasons diversity matters at work:

• Diverse teams perform better because varying perspectives lead to broader company thinking.
• It is easier to process what is familiar; thus, lack of diversity means bias toward one's own image is more likely if you don't train yourself to watch for your biases.
• It takes diversity to attract diversity. The lack of diversity in some fields is often due to minority applicants not applying because they think their chances of being hired are slim, so why bother.
• Under the "stereotype threat," a minority applicant or worker becomes too focused on proving a stereotype wrong and often doesn't do a good enough job.
• Diverse workplaces are more innovative and create businesses with larger audience/customer potential.What's In a Name?

Lots of bias. The sad truth is that, too often, employers will pass over a resume from an ethnic-sounding name. In their report, "Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination," Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent resumes of fictional people to potential employers in Boston, Mass., and Chicago, Ill., in categories of sales, clerical, administrative and customer service. The mix of high-quality and low-quality resumes included some with "white" names and others with "black" names. They picked the most common names in each ethnic group.

Of the nearly 5,000 resumes sent in response to 1,300 employment ads in 2001 and 2002, resumes with white names had a 10.08 percent chance of receiving a callback. Equivalent resumes with African American names had a 6.70 percent chance of being called back. "This represents a difference in callback rates of 3.35 percentage points, or 50 percent, that can solely be attributed to the name manipulation," researchers found.

Whites were favored by nearly 9 percent of the employers, with a majority of these employers contacting exactly one white applicant. African Americans were favored by only about 3.7 percent of employers.

The study also found that African Americans did not get more callbacks even if they lived in better, "whiter" neighborhoods. "Indeed, if ghettos and bad neighborhoods are particularly stigmatizing for African Americans, one might have expected African Americans to be helped more by having a 'good' address. Our results do not lend support to this hypothesis," the authors wrote.

Read report: http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873

TIP: When hiring, have an assistant or Human Resources disguise names and other race-identifying information on resumes and applications before reviewing them.

EVEN BETTER: Consider diversity good business. Deliberately seek diversity and build a pipeline of diversity through good internships and training programs. Build a diverse network and ask for referrals.

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