Real Diversity

I wonder how often the word “diversity” is used by HR professionals, executives, managers, and employment lawyers every week. As my fellow blogger Michael Wade (www.execupundit.com) has pointed out, it’s better to talk in terms of equal opportunity than diversity, but the d-word is firmly ingrained in our everyday workplace language.

It’s also ingrained in actions we take in and out of the workplace. We have diversity committees. We set diversity goals. We portray our organizations as diverse. In the first place, diversity goals can lead to discrimination claims (again, Execupundit). Just as important, the emphasis on diversity sometimes causes us to be flat-out dishonest.

An Inside Higher Ed article makes this perfectly clear for colleges and universities, but this article could also be written about many workplaces. As it turns out, if you look at school viewbooks, you’d think that African-Americans make up 12.4% of the college and university population, when in fact, they make up 7.9%. The same discrepancy occurs for Asian students and Latino students. When it comes to higher education’s attempt to be seen as having a black-friendly environment, 75% of colleges and universities use their viewbooks to demonstrate that they have more black students than they, in fact, have. According to one professor, “Black equals diversity for many people. If you show African-American students, people think that means your institution is diverse.”

Employers have their own viewbooks: annual reports, newsletters, magazines, and company websites that are made available to stockholders, employees, and the public at large. They have pictures in them, most of the time showing a more diverse workforce than exists in the company. (It’s only a matter of time until lawyers representing employees begin using these things against you in discrimination cases.)

Just as we hear a lot about diversity in the workplace (and college campuses), we’ve heard a lot about post-race America during the presidential campaign this year. I’m all for both, but there’s no way we’ll ever see both unless we deal with reality instead of perception. We need to be honest about who we are, what we’re trying to accomplish in our workplaces (and elsewhere), and why we sometimes fail to reach our goals. We need to offer equal opportunity, hire the best-qualified candidates, and hold all people of every race accountable for their job performance. If we do that consistently, diversity should take care of itself.