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No one would dream ofcalling you a bigot. You’ve beena vocal supporter of diversity, made sureyour few fast-track women got good jobpostings, and have even privately coun-seled gays who were worried about theirchances for advancement. Perhaps someof your close friends are black.

But when you look around, your goodintentions and actions have had little im-pact. Above a certain level in your com-pany, the demographics haven’t changedmuch in the last decade. Every promo-tion decision, individually, seemed jus-tified, yet the aggregates would supporta charge of bias. And across corporateAmerica, your experience has been repli-cated at dozens of companies.

Why does this problem persist? Why,despite all the exhortations, training pro-grams, acknowledgment of the businesscase, and headline-making litigation, is itso hard to get minorities and women intoexecutive ranks? We can talk about theusual suspects: the limitations of the tal-ent pool or pipeline, the fact that minori-

ties of various sorts often don’t get ade-quate mentoring or lack robust internalnetworks, that women face work/familyconflicts. But these don’t completely ex-plain the phenomenon.

I believe that prejudice is still a fac-tor—yes, even after all these years ofsoul-searching and anti-discriminationworkshops, even in the most enlightenedcorners of the country. And it’s not aboutonly women and Hispanics and African-Americans.

I have seen it operate at institutionswhere I worked (Goldman Sachs, McKin-sey & Co.) that devoted considerable re-sources to recruiting, hiring, and retain-ing top talent. If prejudice plays a role atfirms that have long considered gettingthe best individuals crucial to their suc-cess, it isn’t much of a stretch to imaginethat it also takes place at companies lessrigorous about personnel decisions.

Mind you, I don’t mean the overt dis-crimination of forty years ago but, rather,subtler forms that can arise from seem-ingly rational behavior and can operate at

an institutional level. Each establishedorganization has a distinctive culture withbarriers to anyone who doesn’t fit.

Yet it is difficult to talk clinically aboutprejudice, in part because individuals areloath to see themselves as prejudiced, andin part due to institutional reluctance toadmit culpability—better to deny the exis-tence of a problem than to create liability.

Talent Versus TurbanI speak from experience. Some of these

experiences have been comic, like thetime when, as a college senior, I wasturned down by Citibank because therecruiter said I reminded him of a toptrader, a woman who had quit after a fewyears to pursue an acting career (mindyou, I had never acted). And some even-tually turned out well. To wit:

Once upon a time, I was starting upthe U.S. merger-and-acquisition depart-ment at Sumitomo Bank and hiring a newMBA. However, I encountered resistanceover my choice, and went to see the boardmember responsible for my unit. “I have

SUSAN WEBBER is founder of Aurora Advisors, a New York-based management-consulting firm. Her last article was a review of The Halo Effect in the March/April issue.

FitFitness

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Despite best intentions and anti-discrimination programs,we still hire people just like us.

By Susan Webber

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found someone I want to hire,” I in-formed Mr. Ono, “but they are giving mea hard time because he is Indian.”

“We have Mr. Patel,” he replied. “Wehave Mr. Gupta. Indian is not a problem.”

“Some people do not like his turban,”I commented.

Mr. Ono recoiled backward in his seat.I looked miserable. After a long silence,Mr. Ono finally said, “Well, I will meethim.”

A week later, after his session with thecandidate, Mr. Ono called and announced,“I have changed my mind. His talent over-comes his turban. We must hire him.”

Indeed, this young man did very well.He was effective internally and well likedby clients, and he played a crucial role insourcing a deal within his first eighteenmonths. He went on to be the head ofcorporate development for a Fortune 500company during an acquisition program,a role that put him in front of its board ona regular basis.

But not everyone was inclined to takethat risk. Contrast this with an experi-ence I had at Goldman a few years earlier:

The Corporate Finance department,then one of the firm’s two most presti-gious areas, interviewed an extraordinaryHarvard Business School student for asummer associate position. He had a re-markable personal story of how he hadgone from India to Brazil and then got-ten to the United States and HBS. He wasalso extremely bright, charismatic, artic-ulate, and savvy (he had the dress codedown perfectly). We recommended himenthusiastically as a summer hire, but thedepartment head nixed it, saying, “Whatkind of campus representative would anIndian be?” Unsurprisingly, CorporateFinance chose not to extend him a full-time offer the following year. PrivatePlacements, a lower-status area, snappedhim up. He did very well in Private Place-ments and was offered a slot in the Tech-nology area, where he became a partner.

One can legitimately argue that thiswas a good outcome. But it begs the ques-tion of whether he could have done evenbetter in Corporate Finance or anotherclient-facing area, if he were given a fair

shot—and he almost assuredly wouldhave had a bigger partnership interesthad he been elevated from one of thosedepartments.

Now, it’s also true that Goldman, withits established reputation and relation-ships, had more at stake than Sumitomo.But these cases point up a fundamentalissue: Are companies making unduly con-servative choices based on their beliefsabout what makes a successful candidate,when those may not be grounded in fact?

Some readers may dismiss these exam-ples because they took place many yearsago. And it almost goes without sayingthat these firms are more sensitive thatthey were back then. But I continue tohear stories like these, of talented peo-ple shunted aside in favor of others whoare more conventional. The fundamentaldynamics haven’t changed, merely the or-ganizational level at which they occur.

Poisoning the Well?Now, I loathe the whole notion of

“diversity”—the idea that a companymust resemble a rainbow to satisfy variousconstituencies, from the EEOC to theNAACP. This isn’t about diversity. Infact, the use of the word “diversity” hurtsthe very groups it is meant to help. Theterm carries the same baggage as “affir-mative action”: the implication that mi-norities and women can’t succeed on theirown and need quotas or other measures toassure they are represented in sufficientnumbers. By implication, diversity is inconflict with merit-based policies.

“Diversity” has the effect of shiftingattention away from the fact that com-panies may be too cautious in how theyselect and promote people. Conservatismleads them to stick with their tried-and-true profile, which in most cases is Cau-casian and male.

But we are still left with the question:If there are capable people in these under-represented groups, why haven’t compa-nies taken advantage of the fact? With somany organizations competing for talent,surely this would have taken care of itselflong ago. A couple of reasons:

BBiiaass iiss mmoorree ddeeeeppllyy rrooootteedd tthhaann mmoosstt

ccaarree ttoo aaddmmiitt.. Like it or not, prevailingsocial preferences are replicated in thecorporate world. Height is correlatedwith higher starting salaries and greaterlikelihood of becoming CEO. Pretty peo-ple are better paid.

But we can consciously correct forthese predispositions, right? Researchsuggests otherwise. A Harvard team,dubbed Project Implicit, has designed aseries of tests to measure “implicit,”meaning unconscious, prejudice. For eachuser, the tests strive to “reveal one’s ownhidden biases” by revealing “attitudes andbeliefs toward social groups and politics.”They take images of people from “in” and“out” social groups, such as young versusold, thin versus fat, straight versus gay.The participants first associate wordswith the pictures along conventional lines(e.g., a picture of a thin person and theword “good”) and then are asked to flipassociations (thin with “bad”). The sys-tem analyzes the test-taker’s speed inmaking the associations—the longer ittakes to associate “thin” and “bad,” thestronger the indication of unconsciousbias in favor of thin people.

Since its 1998 launch, Project Implicithas administered more than 4.5 milliontests and has found roughly 90 percent ofparticipants to harbor biases—includingnegative views of one’s own ethnic group.And more important, the scores don’t changewith repeated testing. In other words, evenknowing how the test works and havingtaken it before, people are unable to over-ride their reflexes. (In Blink: The Powerof Thinking Without Thinking, MalcolmGladwell—himself half black—describesrepeatedly taking the racial-bias test with-out being able to reverse his anti-blackscore.) Indeed, the only thing that appearsto help test-takers surmount their predis-positions is reading something immedi-ately before the test that contradicts them.

What amounts to racial /ethnic/gen-der profiling operates in employmentdecisions. Employers project their viewsupon candidates. In one experiment,economists Marianne Bertrand andSendhil Mullainathan sent five thousandrésumés randomly given either a black-

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sounding name like Kinesha or a white-sounding one like Preston. The result?Employers stopped reading at “Kinesha.”

Sadly, this form of prejudice oftenoverlaps with the more logical “statisticaldiscrimination,” in which entire groupsare viewed in broad stereotypes. And inaggregate, the stereotypes are accurate.Young men are bad risks as drivers and soface high insurance rates. Women in their20s and 30s are likely to have babies,which is disruptive to an employer. Butmany individuals fall outside these pat-terns and suffer as a result.

CCoonnsseerrvvaattiissmm ccaann lleeaadd ttoo bbiiaasseedd oouutt--ccoommeess.. There is a simple reason (beyondnarcissism) why people like to hire intheir own image: They understand and canreadily evaluate their backgrounds. That’swhy the old-school tie isn’t necessarily acabal dedicated to self-promotion. Re-cruiters can probe course selections andextracurricular and social activities, andhave an informed view of the candidate’scharacter. An interviewer simply won’thave the same comfort level with a can-didate when he can’t calibrate her accom-plishments.

Columbia University professor AmarBhide coined the phrase “novelty aver-sion” to describe how investors shun ven-tures that are unprecedented—notably,both Federal Express and Cisco found itdifficult to secure early funding. It isn’tmuch of a stretch to extend his logic tohiring and promotion. Both venture cap-italists and corporations are in the busi-ness of picking winners—the former at-tractive investments, the latter talentedemployees.

This idea of novelty aversion helpsexplain Goldman’s decision to relegate atalented Indian to a lesser role than hemight have assumed. At the time, Gold-man had no Indians in its investment-banking division. By contrast, McKinseyhad a very successful Indian partner andhad been hiring new Indian MBAs (in-cluding Bhide himself) for years beforethe Goldman incident took place.

This preference for the familiar alsoleads companies to adhere to the samehiring rules of thumb, whether or not they

are correct. In many indus-tries, one encounters a pat-tern of hiring certain typesfor specific roles. For ex-ample, former members ofthe armed forces are prizedas drug detail men; tradingfirms take particular interestin candidates who have beensuccessful at blackjack or poker.

Despite firms’ faith in their hir-ing criteria (and many cases, havingthe comfort of seeing competitors usebroadly similar screens), there is no wayto know for sure that your decision rulesare correct. Even if you went to the trou-ble of keeping tabs on candidates whomyou turned down, you could not deter-mine whether their success or failure else-where was a valid indicator of how theywould have done with you.

Consider the experience of OaklandA’s general manager Billy Beane, the heroof Michael Lewis’s Moneyball: The Art ofWinning an Unfair Game. The baseballindustry has always measured players’skill and achievements by a handful ofwell-known statistics, but in recent yearsresearchers have questioned the value ofthose traditional measures. To make themost of a limited budget, Beane used thenew principles to sign low-salaried play-ers whom his analysis showed were dra-matically undervalued. The result: Theteam, with one of baseball’s lowest pay-rolls, has placed first or second in its divi-sion each of the last eight seasons (andthere’s still time to turn around 2007).

Here, then, you have a business wherethe recruiting is unusually transparent,the basic rules have remained unchangedfor decades, competitive encounters arein full view, and the incentives for successare high. This would seem to be the per-fect environment for developing gooddecision rules, yet the entire industry waslargely wrong.

The Power of ExpectationsExpectancy theory tells us that per-

ceptions can become reality. In a classic1968 study, Pygmalion in the Classroom,Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson

t e s t e dall of an elemen-

tary school’s students for intelligence.They then chose a random 20 percent andtold the teachers that they had “unusualpotential for intellectual growth” andwould “bloom” before the school yearended. By June, the students labeled ashigh-potential scored considerably betterthan their peers. Recent studies have con-firmed the relationship between teacherbeliefs and student performance.

It’s reasonable to assume, therefore,that employer expectations will similarlyinfluence an individual’s job performance.That means that doubts about an employ-ee’s ability to do his job can impair hiseffectiveness. If he has a sales call thatgoes less than swimmingly, he’ll notice ifhe is questioned about it. That leads himto wonder how well he is doing, whichwill make him less confident, which willin turn lead people to respond less pos-itively to him. It’s not hard to see howbias, even the unconscious bias studiedby Harvard’s Project Implicit, can leadto subtle, and sometimes overt, negativefeedback toward “out” groups.

This often-unintended denigration ismore pervasive than you might imagine.Consider the experience of Ben Barres,a Stanford professor of neurobiology whowas known as Barbara until undergoing asex change a decade ago. In a recent ar-ticle in Nature, “Does Gender Matter?”,he analyzes the validity of what he callsthe “Larry Summers Hypothesis,” thatwomen are innately less predisposed tosucceed in the sciences than men, versusthe “Stephen Jay Gould Hypothesis,”

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Doubts about anemployee’s ability

can impair hiseffectiveness.

which attributes the underrepresentationof women to acculturation. Barres com-ments on his own experience: “By far, themain difference that I have noticed is thatpeople who don’t know I am transgen-dered treat me with much more respect:I can even complete a whole sentencewithout being interrupted by a man.”

Another illustration: When I was atMcKinsey (admittedly, years ago), thewomen who were being considered forpartner almost without exception weretold in their annual reviews that theyhad a “style” problem; some were sentto Roger Ailes for coaching. The pre-sumption seemed to be that they wouldhave trouble establishing and maintain-ing client relationships. Yet in fact, someof these very women in subsequent jobshad lead account responsibility for thevery same sort of client!

Once the younger women heard aboutthese pervasive “style” concerns, theyincreasingly distrusted the review processand wondered if their efforts would berewarded. These concerns were demoti-vating—and may well have led some ofthe women to try less hard (why bother?)and thus confirm the negative views.

Yet the partners in those days wouldalmost certainly have been dumbfoundedhad they been told that their “style” con-cerns about women were tantamount toprejudice. No doubt they saw their com-ments as constructive and valid criticismand their use of outside coaches as a sin-cere (and costly) effort to help.

The reality is likely to have been morecomplex: that they had a notion of whata good consultant looked and acted like,and that notion, having been developedover many years on a pool of male talent,

was at odds with how women appearedand behaved. It’s a variant of the Money-ball issue: The partners had a methodol-ogy that appeared to work, in part becauseno other one had been tested! But theperceived risks argued against putting toomany people who did not fit the mold (andthat mold just happened not to corre-spond with “female”) in front of clientexecutives.

And yet well-intentioned efforts tolevel the playing field by favoring minori-ties have a mixed track record. In Austra-lia, companies with women directors givethem high marks, yet only half of the largecompanies have women on their boards,versus 90 percent in the United States.Moreover, when the favored minoritygroup does not show its chops quickly, thenet result can be negative. Both able andperhaps not-so-able candidates who rise

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In “Best Practicesor Best Guesses? Di-versity Management andthe Remediation of Inequal-ity,” Alexandra Kalev andher co-authors don’t mincewords about how to deter-mine whether a company’sdiversity program works:“Whether a prescription forinequality is effective or notis inherently an empiricalquestion. Current prescrip-tions are not based on evi-dence.” The study, pub-lished in the August 2006issue of American Sociologi-cal Review, looks at histori-cal data and shows compa-nies how to go about con-structing an effective pro-gram—and how they cansave money by eliminatingan expensive remedy thatdoesn’t produce results.Kalev, a 2005 PrincetonPh.D. and currently a RobertWood Johnson fellow,

spoke from her U.C. Berke-ley office about the study

—MATTHEW BUDMAN

Pundits and researchershave been writing aboutdiversity and diversitytraining for years. Were yousurprised to find that noone had seriously set out todetermine what works?

We were positively sur-prised—though it’s very dif-ficult to get this data, whichis one reason why re-searchers have not studiedwhat works. We were lucky—or proactive—enough toget government data aboutorganizations’ workforcecomposition, the best infor-mation available because it is annual and self-report-ed. And we interviewedpeople in the organizations.A lot of time and moneywas invested in thisresearch.

To cut to the chase:What common corporatepractices don’t work? Isthere anything organiza-tions are doing that theyshould just stop?

Diversity training is themost common corporatepractice that we examined,and it simply doesn’t bringmore women and minoritiesinto management. We ac-tually were not surprised bythis finding, because thereare many studies by socialpsychologists showing thatdiversity training has con-flicting and confusingeffects on workers, with a negative effect on work-ers’ attitudes. So weweren’t surprised to look at the aggregate pictureand see that diversity train-ing really doesn’t matter in terms of hiring and pro-motion. Plus, it’s very, veryexpensive.

Do you expect a back-lash from diversity trainers?

It’d be very interesting forme to discuss these thingswith diversity trainers, be-cause they obviously thinkthat it does work. A coupleof days ago, I sent the studyto a diversity trainer here atBerkeley, and I wonder whatshe’ll say!

An article in the Novem-ber issue of DiversityInc. re-jects your study as “narrow.”

Yes, they didn’t like ourfindings. According to them,we got the business casefor diversity wrong, becausewe say that training doesn’twork. What they got wrongis that we find things thatdo work, that are muchmore cost-effective, andthat ours is the only studythat actually looks at thebottom line of diversityefforts—whether they end

What Works—and What Doesn’t

to executive levels will suffer from thesuspicion that they might not have got-ten there on merit, and that suspicioncan undermine their performance.

The Illusion of MeritocracyOK, so diversity programs may not

serve the people they are designed to help.One of the reasons is that these initiativesare assumed to undermine merit-basedhiring and promotion. Indeed, as Barrespoints out, citing research, “When itcomes to bias, it seems that the desire tobelieve in a meritocracy is so powerfulthat until a person has experienced suf-ficient career-harming bias themselvesthey simply do not believe it exists.” Butthe idea that an organization can be trulymeritocratic is, alas, a fiction.

On a practical level, the best a com-pany can hope for is that, taken as a

whole, the people it hires and promotesare “better”—as defined by the com-pany—than the people it rejects. On anindividual level, the role of luck, com-bined with inherent shortcomings of per-formance-appraisal systems, make it im-possible to have confidence in the fairnessand accuracy of any particular staffingdecision.

Let’s consider an extreme example ofthe role of luck: Felix Rohatyn. Granted,it may seem counterintuitive to ascribethe success of someone with an undeni-able record of talent and accomplishmentto luck. Rohatyn has been America’s pre-eminent investment banker for over fortyyears; he has continued to command loy-alty at the top-executive ranks and haswithstood challenges from two genera-tions of younger talent. Even after an ab-sence of eight years, when he served as

the U.S. ambassador to France, he cameback to robust demand for his services,and his boutique firm stood as high asNo. 2 in the M&A league tables. In 2006,he joined Lehman Brothers as a senioradviser to its chairman, which was seenas a coup for the firm.

Yet Rohatyn came to the United Statesas a Jewish émigré, graduated from Mid-dlebury College, and secured a positionas a gold trader at Lazard Frères. He man-aged to become Andre Meyer’s protege,then the firm’s senior partner and him-self a protean force in the world of fi-nance. Although Rohatyn might havedone well regardless, it is hard to imaginehim reaching the same pinnacle of suc-cess without Meyer’s sponsorship.

Now, for most people, it’s well nighimpossible to pick apart the importanceof ability versus good fortune. Yet early

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up increasing diversity or not.

Your study takes as agiven that the goal of diver-sity programs should be toincrease hiring and promo-tion of women and minori-ties. DiversityInc. says thatyour study “measuresdiversity-related progressby only one indicator:racial composition.” Is itreally all about numbers?

At the end of the day,the numbers should go up.If training increases oppor-tunity and climate anddiversity-friendliness, after ayear or two—or three orfour—it should translate tonumbers going up. This isexactly why we wanted tolook at thirty years of dataand get a long-term per-spective. If you increasecultural awareness amongyour white male employees

and don’t change anythingelse, then you have, well, anot-diversified companywith a lot of culturalawareness.

You argue that the key isto “establish responsibilityfor diversity.” What’s thebest way for a company tomake that happen?

We examine three ways:having an affirmative-action plan that is annuallyevaluated, checking thenumbers in your companyvis-à-vis the labor marketyou recruit from; having anactive diversity committee;and having a full-time staffperson. And these threethings are highly effective.If you don’t have someonein charge, diversity goalsand programs get diffused.

Is it all about carrotsand sticks, about incen-

tivizing individual man-agers to hire and promotewomen and minorities?

We don’t consider orga-nizational responsibility forchange to be a carrot-and-stick approach. It’s notabout any individual’s re-sponsibility—it’s about cre-ating organizational over-sight, where these thingsare being checked upon.Evaluating managers is noteffective: If you make effortsto diversify your group, wewill give you a higher evalu-ation. That doesn’t help in-crease diversity in the longterm. Even if I decide tolook good on an evaluationby hiring a black woman, Ineed to make sure there isno bias in the distribution ofprojects and tasks and noharassment and that all theopportunities are transpar-ent. No one individual cando it—even if that individ-

ual likes diversity training!So having organizationaloversight—someone whocan actually come up witha plan and monitor it—iswhere we think success lies.

But doesn’t it come downto the individual level? It’sstill individual managersmaking decisions on hiringand promotions.

While we can promotechange in their decisions, wecan also promote change inhow the new hires are beingincorporated, in how thecompany is handling pro-motion decisions, in makingthe criteria more transpar-ent. The change that is re-quired is at the system level.It’s more than any specificindividual. It’s about creat-ing an organizational envi-ronment that will be able to not only hire but keepthese people.

careerdec i s ionsand moves oftenhave an arbitrary element (a young per-son takes a rotation into a new area thattakes off, or has a bad run of assignmentsand gets discouraged) that can influencelater career success.

Other factors can thwart an organiza-tion’s meritocratic efforts (many of theseobservations derive from a 1992 paper byPatrick D. Larkey and Jonathan P. Caul-kin, “All Above Average and Other Unin-tended Consequences of PerformanceAppraisal Systems”). Many people, forinstance, run up against conflicts betweenindividual and organizational interests.Implicitly, any employee’s job is to servehis boss, when his check is actually beingcut by the company. If the employeeviews his role as being different than hisboss sees it, the boss’s view prevails,whether or not it is correct. In an extremecase, if the boss wants the employee torun personal errands, and the employeerefuses, he runs the risk of getting a neg-ative review.

There’s the Peter Principle conundrumthat the skill requirements at one levelmay bear little relationship to the de-mands of the next. You’ve heard the oldchestnut, “Promote your best salesman,and you lose a good salesman and gain alousy manager.” But this situation putsbosses in a real bind. If you promote theperson who is best in a department, hisskills may fall woefully short of the re-quirements of his new role. But if youpromote the person you deem best suitedfor that job, and not the top performer athis current role, you will demoralize his

former peers, createresentment againsthim (undermininghis authority and ef-fectiveness), and raisequestions about yourjudgment.

And then there aredifficulties in ranking

employees across organi-zational units. Even though

organizations want consistentratings firmwide, it’s a practical

impossibility. There are considerablebarriers to a manager giving his staffmember honest and useful feedback thatlead to inflated ratings. They have an on-going relationship; and thus both sidesdo not want the review process to createfriction. Yet most employees have an in-flated view of their achievements, whichpredisposes them to doubt, perhaps evenresent, a truthful appraisal. And sincethe assessment of a job of any complex-ity is largely subjective, it’s difficult forthe boss to defend a rating that is at oddswith the employee’s self-assessment. Inaddition, managers consider themselvesat least partly responsible for their sub-ordinate’s performance. Thus a low rat-ing reflects badly on them.

The consequences are profound. Itmeans that the typical defense against thefailure to achieve diversity, that the com-pany was in fact hiring and promotingbased on achievement, is hollow. Thesesystems not only are subjective (inherentto most ratings) but also often lead tocapricious, even unfair results.

And there is evidence that subjectiveprocesses set a higher bar for minoritiesand women. For example, a 1997 Naturepaper by Christine Wenneras and AgnesWold, “Nepotism and Gender Bias inPeer-Review,” determined that womenseeking research grants need to be 2.5times more productive than men to re-ceive the same competence score. In 1999,MIT published the results of a five-year,data-driven study that found that femalefaculty members in its School of Scienceexperienced pervasive discrimination,which operated through “a pattern of

powerful but unrecognized assumptionsand attitudes that work systematicallyagainst female faculty even in the light ofobvious good will.”

So here you have the worst of all pos-sible worlds. You want to achieve diver-sity, if for no other reason than to fore-stall lawsuits and present a better face toyour customers. Yet you have long be-lieved the main reason is that you haven’tbeen able to find enough “talented” mem-bers of the various groups to fill out yourmanagerial ranks. But your performance-appraisal system is subjective and prob-ably unreliable, and the complex natureof organizations means that who rises islargely arbitrary, and it is likely that “out”groups are subject to higher performancestandards. All this to say that women andminorities’ frustration at their failure toachieve reasonable representation maywell be completely justified. Your organ-ization may be guilty as charged.

Making Change HappenThe obstacles to achieving fairer out-

comes are daunting. Individual and insti-tutional biases are insidious and deeplyrooted. Trying to promote diversity mayonly make it harder for the target pop-ulations. And merit isn’t all it’s crackedup to be.

But corporate leaders can take per-verse comfort: There’s a reason why theirefforts to promote diversity have shownlittle success. Not only is this a deeplyrooted problem—until recently, there hasbeen little knowledge of what worked andwhat didn’t. “For years, I have been struckby defenses of different types of diversityprograms in the absence of any kind ofliterature suggesting what worked andwhat didn’t,” says Harvard sociologistFrank Dobbin. “Even the most popularprograms haven’t been examined. You’dgo to an HR manager or vice president ofpersonnel, and they’d say, ‘We do thisbecause it’s a best practice,’ and they haveno idea whether it really works in theirorganization—or anywhere else.”

So Dobbin, along with U.C. Berkeleyresearcher Alexandra Kalev and Univer-sity of Minnesota sociologist Erin Kelly,

Your organizationmay be guiltyas charged.

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conducted a major study, resulting in arecent paper, “Best Practices or BestGuesses? Diversity Management and theRemediation of Inequality,” published inthe August 2006 issue of American Socio-logical Review. The authors collected dataon 708 organizations from 1971 to 2002and examined the impact of differenttypes of diversity programs on manage-rial composition. (See “What Works—and What Doesn’t” on page 22.) Theirconclusions offer guidance for gettingminorities and women into the manage-rial pipeline:

WWhhaatt pprroodduucceess rreessuullttss:: mmaakkiinngg ssppee--cciiffiicc mmaannaaggeerrss rreessppoonnssiibbllee ffoorr iimmpprroovviinngghhiirriinngg aanndd pprroommoottiioonn.. Committees andtask forces—with members representingvarious backgrounds, managerial levels,and business units—have the greatest im-pact. Diversity departments are also help-ful but not quite as effective; their impactappears to be primarily upon recruitmentand hiring practices.

One reason for the success of taskforces may be their ability to identify theobstacles in a particular organization. Forinstance, Deloitte & Touche, which inthe 1980s had been successful in attract-ing and promoting women to the part-nership, saw the proportion of womenadmitted to the partnership fall in 1991.Rather than assume the problem away,chairman and CEO Michael Cook inves-tigated. A team interviewed men andwomen at all levels, including high-cal-iber women who had quit. The findingsdiffered dramatically from their assump-tions, which led the firm to implementa number of new programs. By 1998, thefirm had increased the number of womenin senior positions three-fold.

MMeennttoorriinngg aanndd nneettwwoorrkkiinngg aarree mmoodd--eerraatteellyy bbeenneeffiicciiaall.. According to the re-searchers’ data, company-sponsored net-working programs help white womenthe most; mentoring works for blackwomen; and neither appears terribly ef-fective at improving the managerialprospects of black men.

DDiivveerrssiittyy ttrraaiinniinngg aappppeeaarrss ttoo hhuurrttmmoorree tthhaann hheellpp.. The researchers’ statis-tical analysis showed only one modest

benefit and two negative effects acrossall groups. This is consistent with otherstudies, one of which found that coursesmay actually foster bias, another thatdiversity training actually reduced thepromotion of minorities.

Since the federal data that Dobbin,Kalev, and Kelly compiled lumps all man-agers into a single category, the research-ers weren’t able to look specifically at mi-norities and women in corporations’ topranks. But as Dobbin notes, “You won’tsee progress at the top until you’ve solvedthe problem at the lower levels.”

Some additional commonsense sug-gestions:MMaakkee ggeettttiinngg tthhee rriigghhtt ppeeooppllee aa ttoopp--

lleevveell ccoonncceerrnn.. Most organizations givelip service to the importance of staffing,but serious discussion of personnel issuesis often quickly shunted to HR. Top exec-utives need to demonstrate, through theirquestions and allocation of effort, thatshifting the company’s profile is a priority.

GGeett oonn aa ffiirrsstt--nnaammee bbaassiiss wwiitthh yyoouurrpprreejjuuddiicceess.. It is hard to compensate forpreconceptions in the best of circum-stances, but it’s impossible if you chooseto remain ignorant. Encourage your staffto take the Harvard implicit-bias test (orany similar, well-validated test) that getsat unconscious prejudice. Work with yourlawyers to see if you can survey for biason a broad-scale, anonymous basis so youcan see how the bulk of your managersview various groups.

SShhiifftt tthhee ffooccuuss aawwaayy ffrroomm ddiivveerrssiittyyppeerr ssee.. “Diversity” is a two-edged sword.It’s better to challenge your staff broadlyto bring in new types of talent. For ex-ample, the trend in recruitment for mid-level and senior staff has been to hire peo-ple who have done pretty much the samejob at another company. Unless yourcompetitors have a superior playbook,you might do better to bring in peoplefrom other industries that are facing sim-ilar challenges. Or you can experimentwith more equitable ways to level theplaying field. For instance, Areva, theFrench nuclear-energy company, requiresmanagers to pick women when candidates

of differing genders are rated equally.SSuurrvveeyy tthhee uunnddeerrddooggss.. Many women

and minorities can cite examples of howthey feel they were treated unfairly inthe workplace, yet management oftenremains clueless until the problem risesto the level of litigation. Understandingthe obstacles they face can give you amuch clearer picture of the nature ofthe problem and how to remedy it. Theparticipants need to be assured of con-fidentiality (which means using externalparties to conduct any research), and one-on-one interviews are preferable, sincethey give the richest data (and the deviloften lies in the details).

LLiisstteenn.. In the stone age of the 1980s,DuPont took note of the fact that femaleemployees who participated in a rape-prevention program asked for a coursethat could help them with day-to-dayworkplace issues. The resulting work-shops, titled “A Matter of Respect,” bringtogether mixed groups with a male andfemale facilitator to discuss videotapedexamples of gray-area behavior. Theprogram’s success (it now encompassesother issues relating to workplace diver-sity) has as much to do with management’scommitment as to the program designand robust supporting elements (for ex-ample, 24/7 hotlines). DuPont frames itsobjectives positively, around the impor-tance of treating others well.

LLooookk aatt iiddeeaass aanndd mmooddeellss ffrroomm oouutt--ssiiddee yyoouurr ffiirrmm.. Most companies are loathto step outside their institutional expe-rience. Yet successful examples at otherwell-run firms can help executives over-come “novelty aversion,” including in thearea of staffing.

Rather than move on to more trac-table situations, executives must dig

deeper into the complex and persistentattitudes and behaviors that keep “out”groups outside the executive suite. Touse an expression from Venezuela, “Theyhave changed their minds, but they havenot changed their hearts.” When yourreflexes conflict with your best interests,stepping outside your comfort zone isthe only way to achieve real progress.

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