Evelyn Iritani* says new research suggests majority and minority groups have different definitions of what is a ‘sufficient’ level of diversity.
Employers often base their efforts at achieving diversity on the premise that diversity is achieved when an organisation reaches a certain “critical mass” of underrepresented group members.
Is there a number that makes an organisation that’s dominated by one type of individual “sufficiently diverse”?
If so, who gets to determine those numbers and how?
These questions are at the heart of research by New York University’s Felix Danbold and UCLA’s Miguel Unzueta, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Interpersonal Relations and Group Processes.
Their work suggests the groups people belong to and their relative standing in society play a crucial role in their perception of when an organisation crosses the so-called diversity line.
Their research indicates that the white men who dominate many organisations are likely to view their diversity efforts as a success while the women are likely to want a higher representation of women in technical and leadership roles before declaring victory.
Previous research has shown that diversity is a “nebulous construct subject to biased interpretations along group lines”, according to Danbold and Unzueta.
However, they show how bias influences perceptions of diversity that are based on numerical representations.
They show that members of dominant groups perceive an organisation to be diverse at lower levels than members of non-dominant groups.
Their research explains why employees might evaluate an organisation’s diversity efforts differently, depending on whether their own group holds a majority or minority position or whether they feel threatened by changes in the organisation’s makeup.
Danbold and Unzueta employed a variety of methods and a large set of subjects.
In the first study, 1,074 white and black participants were asked to evaluate one of 21 organisations whose ethnic makeup ranged from 0 per cent black/100 per cent white to 0 per cent white/100 per cent black.
Then they were asked how strongly they agreed or disagreed, on a scale of 1 to 7, with these three statements: 1) this is a diverse organisation; 2) this organisation is diverse enough; 3) this organisation has a diversity problem.
The researchers used the first statement to measure “descriptive diversity” while the second and third statements were categorised as representing “sufficient diversity”.
As predicted, both black and white participants agreed that diversity peaked at the 50/50 stage and was lowest when either group was not represented at all.
In addition, both white and black participants drew the diversity line at a point that was more favourable to their own group.
How might those findings play out in real life?
Consider a scenario in which an organisation develops a diversity initiative that raises the representation of black employees from single digits to around 25 per cent, explain the authors.
White employees would likely find that level sufficiently diverse while black employees would need to see their representation rise to 30 per cent to 35 per cent before reaching the same conclusion.
A second study substituting men and women for black and white employees resulted in similar findings.
These studies supported Danbold and Unzueta’s predictions that dominant and non-dominant groups would set their diversity thresholds at levels that afforded their own group greater participation.
How would this play out if a third non-dominant group was evaluating an organisation in which it had no representation at all?
To test this, the researchers recruited Latino participants and asked them to evaluate organisations with black and white employees.
Even though their group was not represented, the Latinos set diversity thresholds similar to the black participants’.
This reinforced the researchers’ hypothesis that broader concerns about social hierarchy and equity, and not simply a concern about one’s own group, play a role in perceptions of diversity.
If a group saw a threat to its standing because of diversity initiatives, would it cause its members to be biased in favour of greater representation of its own people?
In a separate study, Danbold and Unzueta asked black and white participants to rate organisations on diversity and on four statements designed to measure perceptions of threat.
Those statements included the following: “I am worried that in the future, my ethnic group’s standing in society will be lower than it is today” and “I am concerned that in the future, members of my ethnic group will be treated like second-class citizens”.
The researchers found a significant interaction between participants’ ethnicity and status threat and the setting of the threshold for minimum black representation.
Black and white participants with low threat perceptions reported similar thresholds of around 30 per cent black participation for an organisation to be diverse.
As the threat level increased, however, white participants reduced the level for black employees to 25 per cent, and black participants increased the participation threshold to 35 per cent.
In the real world, those findings might play out in the following way, explain the researchers: Imagine a group in which the percentage of black employees is steadily increasing from single digits toward equal representation.
White employees who perceive a high level of threat to their status might say sufficient diversity has been reached at 25 per cent.
But white employees with a lower threat-to-status sentiment, along with black employees, would want that number to reach 30 per cent before declaring the group diverse.
And black employees with high sentiment of threat to their status might want to see those figures reach 35 per cent.
Context is important.
Many institutions that have failed in recent years to achieve overall employment levels — and leadership levels — that mirror racial and gender representation of the population prefer a discussion of diversity that leaves out precise representation.
Some like to talk about improvements made; others want, in essence, an A for effort.
Even when the numbers are known, this research shows, perceptions of diversity diverge between dominant and non-dominant groups.
Sharing and understanding those differences could help lessen resistance to underrepresented groups’ greater inclusion.
* Evelyn Iritani is a Pulitzer Prize–winning business writer.
This article first appeared at www.anderson.ucla.edu.
