Minorities helping minorities doesn't work

17 Jul 2017

Ugh:

For female and non-White executives, the more they valued diversity, the worse they were rated for performance and competence. And the non-White leaders who received very high performance ratings (higher even than the White majority) showed the least interest in diversity.

Here's an interesting idea for fixing this problem, though:

Hekman’s team discuss a few possible ways to tackle this, and suggest an intriguing approach: to reward any organisational member that hires someone demographically different from them. This rule would apply to everyone, with a sound logic – what might you learn from a second-in-command with a different background to you? – and in practice, its application would increase minority numbers by virtue of the sheer numbers of majority group members seeking out someone different.

But the conclusion is that those with privilege need to help those without it:

Whatever the exact approach, one takeaway from this is that it is going to be harder for minorities to promote diversity in organisations, because their motives are going to be taken as suspect. So White men who care about diversity should step up and make the case for it. They are relatively insulated, whereas for others, the case may be simply too costly to make.