by Danny Lambouths III, William Scarborough, and Allyson Holbrook

Who Supports Diversity Policies

Since the 1980s, companies have increasingly adopted diversity policies to improve the representation of women and racial minorities in the workplace. Today over 95% of companies with at least 1,000 employees have instituted programs to increase diversity and inclusion within their ranks.

Despite this, we know remarkably little about how people feel about these programs, and even less about why they feel the way they do. This is a major knowledge gap. Research shows that diversity programs are more effective when workers support them — and when done correctly, they offer great opportunities to improve workplace equity and, ultimately, firm performance. At their worst, however, they can stimulate resistance and actually create an even more challenging environment for underrepresented workers.

To help companies take full advantage of these programs and close this knowledge gap, we conducted a study guided by the following three research questions:

     1. How supportive are workers of the diversity policies at their companies?
     2. How do policy characteristics impact levels of support?
     3. How do workers’ social attitudes impact levels of support?   

Part One: How supportive are workers of the diversity policies at their companies?

We analyzed data from a 2015 survey of 1,862 randomly selected Latinx, black, and white people working for wages/salary (not self-employed) in the United States. Because the survey was conducted with a random sample of adult Americans, there was broad representation across industries and occupations. By virtue of using a large and diverse sample, we were able to examine overall levels of support for eight common diversity policies, as well as identify whether these attitudes differed by demographics. Here are the eight types of policies we studied:

Generic: policies that address inequity in the workplace
Targeted recruitment: policies that actively recruit minorities to apply for job openings
Voluntary training: policies that offer voluntary diversity training to employees
Mandatory training: policies that require diversity training for all employees
Mentorship: policies that provide underrepresented workers with mentors who can assist them with job and career changes
Formal hiring policies: policies that rely on formalized/documented criteria for making decisions about hiring and promotion
Diversity office: policies that establish a special office or committee that identifies barriers to diversity and works to remove those barriers
Diversity goals: polices that establish numerical goals for addressing the underrepresentation of certain groups in the workplace

Looking at overall levels of support across policies, voluntary training and the establishment of a diversity office received the most support. This is good news, since these two policies have been proven to improve workplace diversity. Unfortunately, however, two other policies that have also been shown to be effective strategies, targeted recruitment and the establishment of accountable diversity goals, were the least popular. We believe these differences in support result from workers interpreting the latter policies as more compulsory than the former. As other research has shown, workers are more likely to resist diversity initiatives that are forced upon them.

Comparing levels of support between respondents, we found major differences by race and gender. Women, black, and Latinx workers are, as a whole, more supportive of diversity policies than men and white people. Across seven of the eight policies, black workers reported the highest levels of support, followed by Latinx workers, with whites showing the greatest opposition. Across gender, women reported higher levels of support than men for all but one of the policies, where women and men held similar opinions.
   
Read the rest at Harvard Business Review.