Rightly or wrongly, in our society we pay for what we value
My employer just asked for volunteers to serve on a initiative to recruit more qualified candidates of color. On the surface, there doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with this. On closer examination, it speaks volumes.
In our society, whether we like it or not, the most significant way we show that we value something is our willingness to pay for that knowledge/service. So when organizations ask for service in the name of diversity, but don’t attach any resources, that is a big red flag about their actual valuation of the importance of the mission. Here are three reasons why it’s a bad practice:
1. Just being a member of (or being interested in advancing) an underrepresented group doesn’t necessarily give one the right background to provide diversity training/services
Likely a large part of the reason is that the company’s biases are built into their core systems. In addition, there are limited rigorous studies about what actually works when it comes to changing attitudes. A 2009 literature review by Elizabeth Levy Paluck and Donald P. Green in the Annual Review of Psychology concludes about prejudice reduction training:
People who are educated for other roles such as computer engineering, or teaching middle school math, cannot reasonably be expected to fix their organization’s longstanding diversity problems. Especially when that time-consuming role carries no extra compensation. In fact, unless supervisors attach a high value to it, this mission may actually end up hurting their careers. They may pour time and personal energy into a mission that yields neither increased compensation nor promotions.
2. One way that has been proven to reduce bias, which is to assign people to diverse groups and give them meaningful control over their work, is the prerogative of managers
It turns out that one of the few approaches to decreasing bias that has been scientifically validated is one that is within the control of managers, not the rank and file employees who are often asked to volunteer to improve diversity. That approach is simply to create diverse teams with genuine responsibility. It turns out that people quickly start to identify with their teams. In a remarkable study using brain imaging that was published in 2008in the journal Psychological Science, Jay J. Van Bavel et al concluded that:
“In-group biases in neural processing occurred within minutes of team assignment…and independently of preexisting attitudes, stereotypes, or familiarity.”
In other words, diverse group members demonstrated brain activity consistent with connecting with other members of their group very shortly after being put together. This bias in favor of fellow group members occurred IN SPITE OF preexisting attitudes/stereotypes.
3. Asking individual employees to correct institutional inequities obscures the difference between personal and systemic bias
In other words, systemic problems require systemic solutions. So don’t expect that having your new associate plan a luncheon, or serve on an HR committee, will fix your organization’s deep-rooted problems. That will require self-study and meaningful change. That change must include compensation for the time you ask your employees to spend improving your organization’s culture around diversity.
Van Bavel, Jay J., et al. “The Neural Substrates of In-Group Bias: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Investigation.” Psychological Science, vol. 19, no. 11, 2008, pp. 1131–1139. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40064900. Accessed 8 July 2020.
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