Why corporate diversity programs fail and how small tweaks can have big impact Joan C. Williams
Transcriber:
In 2018, two Black men
went to a Starbucks
to wait for a business associate.
But when they asked to use the bathroom,
the manager ordered them to leave.
They refused.
He called the police,
and the video went viral.
Amidst an avalanche of bad publicity,
Starbucks closed all stores
across the country
for four hours of diversity training.
And so, baristas were handed workbooks
with prompts like,
“What makes me me and you you?”
and, “Understanding our bias:
from color-blind to color brave.”
This made newspapers across the country,
and arguably, that was the goal.
“Look, everyone! We’re solving
our diversity problem!”
The assumption, though, was that you could
address structural racism
with an earnest conversation
about our feelings.
My take:
give me a break.
To address structural racism,
you need to change structures.
So in the aftermath
of George Floyd’s death,
my sense is that many companies
are feeling pressure
to actually deliver
on their diversity goals,
but they haven’t a clue what to do.
And that’s because we spent probably
close to a billion dollars on diversity.
But the basic tools of the diversity
industrial complex,
they just don’t work.
A one-shot bias training –
it doesn’t work
for a really simple reason:
doing anything once won’t change
a company’s culture.
And the other basic tools –
things like an employee resource group
or a women’s initiative –
they’re fine,
if the problem is with the women
and the people of color.
But it’s not.
If a company faces challenges
surrounding diversity,
typically, it’s because subtle
and not-so-subtle forms of bias
are constantly being transmitted
through their basic business systems –
through hiring,
through performance evaluations,
through access to opportunities.
So we need to stop trying to fix
the women and the people of color.
We need to fix the business systems.
And if you think about it,
this makes sense,
because if a company was facing
challenges with sales,
it wouldn’t respond by holding
a series of sincere conversations
about how much we all value sales
and put on programming
for “National Celebrate Sales Month”
and expect sales to improve.
But that’s a lot of what we’re doing
in the diversity context.
If we really want to tackle
diversity effectively,
we need to use the same tools businesses
use to tackle any business problem –
evidence and metrics.
And, you know, I suspect
this will come as a relief
to a lot of CEOs who feel far more
comfortable using those tools
than they do with trying to lead
a deep conversation
about the inner workings
of social inequality.
The first step
is for us to understand
what bias looks like on the ground.
And I and my team at WorkLife Law,
we have been studying how bias plays out
in everyday workplace interactions
for well over a decade.
And what we find
is that the same patterns of bias,
the same five patterns,
they emerge over and over again.
So here’s what the evidence looks like.
The first pattern we call
“prove it again.”
Some groups have to prove themselves
more than others.
This is triggered
by lots of different things.
It’s triggered by race and gender,
age, disability, LGBTQ status,
even social class.
So one study, for example,
looked at callbacks offered to white men
with identical qualifications
but different hobbies.
One résumé listed things
like sailing and polo,
and the other résumé listed things like
counseling first-generation
college students
and country music.
And, if you can believe it, Mr. Polo –
he got 12 times the number of callbacks
as Mr. Country Music.
Too often when we talk about privilege,
we forget about class.
The second pattern is called
“the tightrope,”
and it reflects the fact
that a certain in-group of white men
just need to be authoritative
and ambitious in order to succeed.
But women walk a tightrope,
where they may be seen as abrasive
if they’re authoritative
but unqualified if they’re not.
And people of color who behave assertively
often are written off
as angry if they’re Black,
even hotheaded if they’re Latinx
and sometimes as untrustworthy
if they’re Asian American.
The next pattern we call the “tug-of-war,”
and it reflects the fact
that sometimes bias against a group
fuels conflict within the group.
So, for example, if there’s room
for only one woman or person of color,
it’s entirely predictable:
women are going to be
supercompetitive with other women,
and people of color,
competitive with other people of color.
The fourth pattern of bias is actually
the strongest form of gender bias,
called “the maternal wall.”
And it reflects assumptions
that mothers aren’t committed,
probably shouldn’t be
and aren’t competent –
think “pregnancy brain.”
So mothers often find
they have to prove themselves yet again
when they return from maternity leave.
And if they do, they may be seen as
bad mothers and so as bad people
and disliked.
The final pattern consists
of racial stereotypes.
So, Asian Americans again and again report
that they’re seen as a great match
for technical skills,
but lacking in leadership potential.
And our studies show that Black
professionals, again and again,
report really high levels of isolation
and often startling forms of disrespect.
And an Asian American professional
may be seen as too emotional
in a discussion where, you know what,
a white man behaving exactly the same way
would be seen as having a career-enhancing
passion for the business.
And so what we find is that white women
report four patterns of bias.
Men of color also report four.
Women of color report all five
in very substantial proportions.
And among women of color,
Black women report
the most bias as a group.
But the bottom line, really, is that
the experience of white men as a group
differs from that of every other group.
If a white man is a first-generation
professional or LGBTQ,
he may encounter bias.
But but most aren’t.
These biases can have
really serious negative effects.
There’s a ton of research.
But here’s a story
that really says it all.
We were working with one company,
and we spoke to a woman engineer
who had found a mistake
in one of the calculations
of a male colleague,
and she pointed it out.
When she pointed it out,
she was violating an unwritten rule.
The good woman is seen as modest,
self-effacing and nice,
not a mission-driven expert.
That’s why male experts in meetings
exert more influence.
But you know what?
Female experts, they actually exert
less influence than female nonexperts do.
And so when this engineer pointed out
the mistake in calculation, she told us,
the response of her department
was so massively negative that, she said,
“Now I’m just smiling a lot
and bringing in cupcakes.”
This company, by allowing
gender bias to go unchecked,
was literally jeopardizing their mission.
So what’s the solution?
The solution is to use bias interrupters,
new tools my team has developed
that are evidence-based
and metrics-driven.
And I’ve just told you about
a lot of the evidence.
Metrics are also superimportant
because they help you pinpoint
where things are going wrong.
So if a company
has challenges with hiring,
they should be keeping track of who
is in the original pool of candidates
and who survives résumé review
and who gets called to interview
and who survives the interview.
And the reason that’s important
is because the fix,
if you have a nondiverse original pool,
is totally different than the fix
if no woman ever survives the interview
because every woman is either too witchy
or too meek.
Metrics are also superimportant
for another reason:
to establish baselines
and measure progress.
If you use evidence and metrics,
what we have found is that small tweaks
can have really big effects.
So we’ve worked with
one company, for example,
who asked us to look at
their performance evaluations.
And when we did,
we found that only 9.5 percent
of the people of color
had leadership mentioned
in their performance evaluations.
That was 70 points lower
than white women.
And that was superimportant
because, as you can imagine,
mentions of leadership
predicted advancement.
And so we worked with them
to do two simple things.
First, we redesigned
the performance evaluations form.
And second, we help them develop
a simple one-hour workshop that,
among other things,
projected actual comments from the prior
year’s performance evaluations,
and asked people a simple question:
Which of the five patterns of bias
does this represent,
or is it no bias?
Just doing that, we found in year two,
100 percent of the people of color
had leadership mentioned
in their performance evaluations.
At this company, white women,
they had a different problem.
Almost 20 percent had comments
in their performance evaluations
that they didn’t really want
to make partner –
this was a partnership.
And we suspected the women hadn’t
actually said that.
It was just assumptions.
And so in that one-hour
workshop, we told people,
“Hey, don’t say this unless
you’ve actually had a conversation,
and someone has told you
they don’t want to make partner.”
In year two, only one woman
got that comment –
one woman in the entire company.
And so what we find is that we have
helped over 100 companies
actually make progress
towards their diversity goals.
And there’s growing evidence
that these bias interrupters work.
And the best thing about them
is that they help every single group.
So in this company
I’ve been talking about,
in year two, people of color
got wildly more constructive feedback –
it was like a 30-percent jump.
But white women, they got more
constructive feedback, too,
and so did white men.
If you design your systems
based on evidence,
it’s going to help every single group.
So the bottom line, if you think about it,
your systems and your culture,
they reflect the people
you’ve already hired.
So if you want to replicate
that workforce into the future,
definitely keep on doing
exactly what you’re doing.
But if you don’t,
if you actually want to make progress
on diversity, equity
and inclusion – what we call DEI –
my message to CEOs is reassuring:
you already know what to do.
Use standard business tools,
start from the evidence,
gather metrics to establish baselines
and measure progress
and keep at it
until you achieve your goals.
That’s the new DEI playbook.
And it works.
Thank you.