You may have noticed that the word “diversity” has disappeared from corporate homepages and university mission statements, replaced by the less controversial language of “belonging” and “culture”. This disappearing act is, in part, a response to fear of investigations, lawsuits or the withdrawal of government grants, but it is more important than that. It reflects a tension that was beginning to intensify before President Trump took office for a second term—a growing concern about how routine actions taken by institutions to increase diversity are affecting their ability to support an ideal regime, where the “best” are elected.
A colleague who works on the strategic planning board of a major American university recently told me about an exchange with their president. During a meeting about a proposal to increase student diversity, the university’s president argued, “Is diversity important to our institution? Yes.
The proposal did not address qualifications or changes in standards. However, the words “increasing diversity” come to mind, indicating that its validity would be compromised. You can see this organization. Words such as “diverse recruitment” imply that the candidate is not qualified; the acronym “DEI” was repurposed to mean “I didn’t earn it.” And a series of challenges from business leaders and beyond have questioned organizations’ DEI practices due to concerns about their impact on achievement.
My research, in collaboration with Eileen Suh and Yue Wu, suggests that this belief in the trade-off of diversity—the idea that efforts to increase diversity undermine the electoral chances of the “best”—is surprisingly widespread in a nationally representative survey of everyday Americans and may be key to understanding the political deadlock in this arena.
Let me offer a statement that shouldn’t be controversial, even though it often sounds that way in liberal circles: Fitness is important. It is the core of the entire selection process in organizations. As my colleagues in the departments of management, psychology and sociology would be quick to say what “meritocracy” means is up for debate. But we have to admit, at a basic level, that aptitude—skills, abilities, and knowledge—is very important when it comes to selecting candidates. To borrow from the philosopher Michael Sandel, consider how you can go about choosing a surgeon you like. If they have to go under the knife to remove the cancer, you want a surgeon who is very experienced and skilled, and nothing else is important.
But relevance is not the only thing that matters, especially when it comes to the broader environmental programs of organizations and universities. Many also strive to distinguish their student bodies and faculties for other reasons, including correcting historical wrongs; cultivating a dynamic, multifaceted learning experience that exposes others to new ideas and backgrounds; and to meet the needs of an increasingly global market.
Our research, which includes a nationally representative sample of more than 5,800 Americans, uses surveys to understand what people think is the causal impact of introducing actions to improve diversity on the opportunity to find the best candidates. We found that introducing even a single, common practice of diversity lowered people’s belief that the selection process would be fair. The results also showed that this belief was divided politically. Conservatives are more likely to believe in the diversity-meritocracy trade-off, and, surprisingly, moderates and those who identify as less liberal believe this too, to a lesser degree. Only those who identified as liberal or very liberal did not support this belief.
And we’re not talking about hard diversity practices like interview mandates (like Rooney’s rule) or combining bonuses with different numbers, practices that can pressure managers to compromise candidate quality. In our study, we only present early stage procedures as attempts to increase the pool of applicants unrelated to how candidates are screened.
These differences in beliefs about what diversity does in a democracy provide a powerful lens for understanding our current state of bankruptcy. Organizations can’t figure out how to do both diversity and respect in a way that satisfies everyday Americans across the political spectrum. Scrubbing websites with the word “diversity” in place of safe language or cleverly dropping the consideration of diversity from board selection criteria is like throwing a placemat in a deep, unfair place at the base. It was presented with a pass, but the fault line is still very full.
So, the million dollar question is: Is it possible to create a selection process that promotes diversity and raises the specter of democracy in the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike? We can end separate actions and satisfy conservatives but annoy liberals. Or we could include them and satisfy the liberals but alienate the conservatives. We have to choose a side. But in the process of collecting data from people across the country, we learned something unexpected why liberals and conservatives split, suggesting a way out.
Previous research in social and political science led us to expect that conservatives would be less likely to support diversity policies than liberals because they are more biased toward minorities than liberals. Our data show that, on average, conservatives have more negative views about the competence of minority candidates than liberals, but we also find that discrimination differences do not explain why conservatives believe there is a diversity-meritocracy trade-off and liberals do not. Our data instead point to important differences in what liberals and conservatives think is right in this field.
Liberals’ view of justice is one of corrective justice—a way of making a system that is currently unjust. Actions to promote diversity are seen as a way to redress past injustices where underrepresented groups have been excluded, or disadvantaged, from selection processes. Conservatives view the current selection system as inherently unbiased and thus interpret the use of diversity-enhancing practices as an unjustified deviation from neutrality. Because of these conflicting justice lenses, even early access efforts—such as recruiting at historically Black colleges—can cause a breakdown in trust.
However, it turns out that we can get liberals and conservatives to agree on changing the design of the selection process to address their concerns about fairness. As one example, consider a two-stage selection process. In the first phase, organizations subscribe to actions that promote diversity such as increasing recruitment efforts, adjusting job advertisements to ensure that more people feel comfortable applying and raising awareness of bias. However, the final selection decisions are then considered blind to the background of the candidates—a clear indication that identity cannot influence who is selected.
For one of our most valuable courses, we partnered with the admissions office of a major US business school. We surveyed more than 1,000 current MBA students and graduates—the very people whose careers depend on the perceived value of their degrees—on how to find the best candidates in the context of MBA admissions. Half of them saw a description of their institution’s actual diversity efforts followed by a note indicating that their school would use a “blind” assessment to make final selection decisions. The other half (control condition) observed the same explanation of the diversity efforts without blinding practice. We then asked everyone if they thought the program would be effective in finding the best candidates.
In the control situation, we see significantly different opinions: Fully 80 percent of liberal students and former students believe that the selection process will work well, but only 45 percent of conservatives. In the case of blind testing, however, this gap narrowed significantly: 79 percent of liberals still thought the selection process would work well, and now 66 percent of conservatives did. Liberals were fine with blind tests as long as they were preceded by honest efforts to promote diversity. Conservatives were OK with many actions to improve the diversity of the former class as long as they hoped that the final decisions would not be influenced by ownership. The majority of people in both groups did not view diversity and democratic recognition as a trade-off.
Selection processes are the gatekeepers to the organizations formed by Americans across the political spectrum. It’s okay if people disagree about which candidate is the best if they accept the process as fair and legitimate. We should not treat diversity and respect as if they were two ends of a saw. We can find ways to do both in a way that works for more people than you think.
