As a business student it is important to me that there is diversity in the workplace. This is why I chose my diary on diversity in the workplace for my showcase. Diversity in the workplace means that a company should have a large variety of people of different genders and ethnicities working for them. Obviously, companies should not hire someone just because they are a minority. However, seeking out more diverse talent is important. It is even proven that companies who exhibit gender and ethnic diversity are respectively 15% and 35% more likely to outperform companies that do not. Diversity in leadership positions is also important, as companies in the top quartile of executive-board diversity reported returns on equity that were 53% higher than those in the bottom quartile. Some more interesting statistics on workplace diversity are shown below:
The reason that companies with more diversity are more successful is because they are bringing in a group of people who all have unique perspectives and can problem solve in many different ways. A possible explanation for a potential lack of diversity can be from forms of unconscious bias. These are biases that we apply to someone without even thinking about it. People tend to hire people who are similar and have similar backgrounds to themselves. Getting rid of these biases can go a long way in terms of creating more diversity in the workplace. Stanford Business released an interesting article on how to get rid of some of these biases. It is a model where companies provide bias training to employees and experts would analyze the company’s procedures and determine if any bias is creeping in. The experts would then work with the managers to determine how to fix these issues. These biases can lead to gender inequality in the workplace as well, as research has shown there are stereotypes between what men and women are capable of in the Workplace.
This figure shows that while men and women are both equally entering the work force, very few women get executive or managerial positions. Clearly women are being promoted at a much lower rate than men, which also stems from unconscious bias as most people probably do not even realize they are discriminating against women in the workplace. From gender and ethnic inclusion in the workplace, it all relates to the self vs the other in my opinion. People are naturally going to have a bias in hiring people who are similar to them. By not looking at people who are different than us as the “other” we can make serious strides for diversity in the workplace which should in turn increase the company’s success.
SOURCES: https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0217/pages/disrupting-diversity-in-the-workplace.aspx
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/reducing-gender-inequality-work-one-small-step-time