Many companies keen to resolve discrimination issues have opted to appoint chief diversity officers.
These executive-level positions are tasked with inculcating justice and fairness within the organization through a variety of means, such as encouraging diverse hiring and promotion, organizing diversity training programs, addressing discriminatory systems and events and advising other leaders about legal requirements and diversity concerns.
Companies that have introduced the CDO position should be praised for their effort, but such decisions may not change their organizations as much as they expect.
What’s Limiting CDOs?
Research by the National Bureau of Economic Research that studied 462 universities between 2001 and 2016 found that “the proportion of underrepresented tenured faculty hired in universities with a CDO present is 2.8 percentage points less diverse than in universities without a CDO at a 10 percent level of significance.”
This is surprising, as we would expect and hope that universities with a CDO role would hire and retain diverse faculty at a higher rate than those without. This single study is certainly not evidence that CDO positions are irrelevant or a negative problem; however, it highlights a clear need for greater research on the efficacy of the role.
One potential cause for results like these is that despite the very best of intentions of statutory organizations like the EEOC (U.S.) or the Equal Opportunities Commission (U.K.) and requirements like the General Data Protection Regulation (E.U.), the collection of identifying demographic details about job applicants prior to hiring is legally prohibited.
This makes it nearly impossible for well-intentioned and concerned CDOs and organizations to determine whether the candidates subsequently appointed are a good statistical representation of the candidates who applied or were considered for the job.
Because CDOs are restricted from measuring their hiring efficacy, as in the case of the studied universities, they end up with relatively unchanged organizational representation. Many of the companies that we work with saw limited changes in demographic distribution after their appointment of a CDO.
Why Doesn’t DEI Training Work?
Additionally, it seems that CDO appointment has little effect on the rate of discriminatory event occurrence. This is supported by research indicating that diversity training programs are not very effective.
A meta-analysis of various studies across both academic and business organizations reveals a multitude of reasons why these training programs fail to deliver results.
DEI Training Statistics
- A meta-analysis of 426 studies found weak immediate effects on unconscious bias and weaker effects on explicit bias. A side‑by‑side test of 17 interventions to reduce white bias toward Black people found that eight reduced unconscious bias, but in a follow‑up examining eight implicit bias interventions and one sham, all nine worked, suggesting that subjects may have learned how to game the bias test.
- Decades of research on workplace training of all sorts suggests that by itself, training does not do much.
- Field and laboratory studies find that asking people to suppress stereotypes tends to reinforce them — making them more cognitively accessible to people.
- Recent research suggests that training inspires unrealistic confidence in antidiscrimination programs, making employees complacent about their own biases.
- When subjects are told that their employers have prodiversity measures such as training, they presume that the workplace is free of bias and react harshly to claims of discrimination.
- Self-determination research shows that when organizations frame motivation for pursuing a goal as originating internally, commitment rises, but when they frame motivation as originating externally, rebellion increases.
As much as diversity training programs feel important and necessary in the fight against injustice, research does not support their efficacy. This may feel disheartening, and for us, it is. How can organizations become diverse, equitable and inclusive if an intelligent and intentional exploration of biases and positionality doesn’t work?
The Key to Reversing Discriminatory Hiring Practices
Why aren’t organizations already diverse? Because historically, they hired disproportionately in favor of a privileged group.
Why did they disproportionately hire white men? Because selection decisions were made using methodologies rife with bias.
In the 1929 article on bias in face‑to‑face interviews, Rice concluded, “The moral as to the need in any given inquiry of a controlled interviewing technique scarcely needs to be mentioned” (emphasis ours). In this context, Rice is describing a means of interviewing that is standardized, structured and measurable. He advocates for an interview process that aims to cut through the bias inextricable from human interaction.
Demographic distinctions such as race and gender have no bearing on how well an individual scores on objective measures. Whether Black, Asian, white or Hispanic or Latino, individuals are equally capable of measuring high or low. Being a woman or male has no influence on a person’s capacity for Talent.
Whether individuals are or are not high performers does not correlate to demographic groupings. This means that if selection decisions are based on solely objective measures, the resulting appointments should be nearly exact representations of the population at large.
Any organization that struggles with diversity needs only to recognize that this underlying objectivity is the key to reversing decades of racial and gender discrimination.
What to Look for in a CDO
The selection process is at the core of an organization’s representation distribution, yet too many companies rely on the instincts of their hiring managers and interviewers to ensure an equitable workforce.
This will never work.
Chief diversity officers have their hands tied when it comes to measuring the fairness of their hiring process, and so their efficacy is difficult to prove. The biases that cause discriminatory hiring don’t change through training programs and may even worsen the problem by providing a false sense of security.
We suggest that companies seeking to inculcate true diversity ensure that the CDO role is occupied by an individual who:
- Is well-versed in psychometric assessment;
- Has experience in statistical measures of validity, reliability and fairness; and
- Is tasked with solving the danger of unchecked bias in selection processes.
The role of CDO is an excellent choice for an organization looking to incorporate objective measures of predictability into the selection process. CDOs are uniquely positioned to understand the biases inherent in all interactions and can become powerful advocates for systems that diminish the effects of these biases on an organization’s operation.
The right CDO will see the benefit of a data-driven approach.
Excerpt from THE FIVE TALENTS THAT REALLY MATTER: How Great Leaders Drive Extraordinary Performance by Barry Conchie and Sarah Dalton. Copyright © 2024. Available from Hachette Go, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
