If you look around your workplace and everyone, or least all the managers, look the same - same sex, skin colour, social class, age - then your company has a diversity problem. But why is it a problem?





Because the most obvious explanation is a failure of meritocracy. Such features as the colour of one's skin or sex are arbitrary and irrelevant to people's ability to do a job. Therefore the fact that people of certain skin colours or sex are missing from your workplace relative to the wider society presents a prima facie challenge to the fairness of your company's criteria for employment and promotion. To assume otherwise - for example that people of certain colours, sex, class, age, happen to have different (inferior) career preferences or different (inferior) talents has no credibility. It is to assume the exact set of facts most convenient to make a problem someone else's, rather than to take responsibility for investigating and fixing it.





Call this the negative argument for diversity: If you don't have internal diversity in line with the wider society then you are probably treating people unfairly and you need to investigate and try to fix it. For example by identifying and mitigating biases in how job applicants are evaluated and structural impediments to their career progress. It leaves a lot of details still to be argued out, but I think it is the right way to go.





But there is another kind of argument that is now much more common, the positive argument that organisations should promote diversity because it pays off. This is the argument I want to criticise, on the grounds that it jeopardises the negative argument from fairness; reduces individuals to stereotypes about groups; and perpetuates unjust stereotypes and social relations.



The positive argument for diversity in the workplace is that it produces productivity gains for the group as a whole. A large number of empirical studies seem to support this. A group with more variety of racial, gender, class, and sexuality types will tend to have more variety of life experiences and ways of looking at the world. Such groups will be able to bring more different perspectives to problems and will therefore be more likely to come up with better, more innovative solutions. An additional important mechanism is friction. Because of the social distance between members of different groups, everyone ups their mental game in comparison with the mutual complacency that might pervade a group where everyone is very comfortable with everyone else. It is like the difference between the way you clean your house when a stranger is coming to dinner and the way you clean up when it is just your friends coming over for a beer.









I. Say Goodbye to Fairness

The first problem with supporting diversity because it pays off is that it undermines the genuinely ethical concern about fairness to workers. The productivity argument at its simplest goes like this:

Premise: Empirical research has shown that (at least some forms of well-managed) diversity increase employee productivity.

Conclusion: Therefore, corporations should promote (those forms of) diversity.

However, there is an implied but unstated premise needed to complete the argument.

Missing premise: If an action has higher productivity than alternatives, corporations should do it

Thus the productivity argument introduces a particular standard by which to judge diversity policy or any other action: will it raise productivity? This is an entirely amoral but conventional approach to business. It is not about which values we should have but only about the most efficient way to advance the material interests of the corporation. Diversity policies are to be evaluated in just the same way as schemes for minimising tax exposure.





But the productivity argument for diversity is actually anti-ethical because it undermines any concern for a genuinely moral principle like fairness and the perspective of (would-be) employees in general. The productivity argument does not provide the corporation with an additional reason to support workplace diversity as well as fairness. Instead it offers an entirely different way of reasoning about diversity that competes with fairness. Diversity is now a right that companies have over their workforce as part of their general right to maximise profitability. It is not a duty that companies owe to people as part of their general duty to respect every person's inherently equal dignity. In this logic fairness cannot even be understood as a reason for action. It can only appear indirectly in the corporation's calculations - if enough people were upset about it to affect work output.





Moreover, diversity policies that follow from a concern with productivity are likely to be quite different - worse - from those that follow from fairness. Because the productivity argument for diversity is purely instrumental it is entirely dependent on how facts turn out. Suppose it turns out that including people with some skin colours, or some combinations, doesn't work as well or has more expensive management costs. (This seems consistent with the literature.) Then the productivity argument for diversity says companies ought not to hire people from those groups unless they are the only choice. People of those types will face systematic employment discrimination whatever their personal achievements.

More specifically, the productivity perspective argument does not instruct the corporation to support diversity as a general principle at the same level as 'pursue profit', but rather to use empirical findings about diversity to achieve desired outputs. Managers are supposed to operate like gardeners, micromanaging the precise combination of species most likely to generate the sort of harmonious interactions they are looking for, and at the level of maintenance they are willing to commit to.

Thus, a company might say to unfortunate job candidates something along these lines,

"We are confident you could do this job very well. However, research has shown that statistically people of your ethnic background are 5% less stimulating to team productivity than people of type x".

Or

"Our diversity recipe calls for 1 part x to 3 parts y to 4 parts z. We are already full up with your kind"

Or even, [ because not every organisation values increased creativity higher than its management costs ]:

"The work here is routine: creativity is not needed and is strongly discouraged. Therefore we keep diversity to a minimum and only hire people who look the same. We find it much easier to manage our employees that way."



