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Here's a Harvard Business Review study on why diverse teams outperform homogeneous teams.

Diverse teams are more innovative and focus on facts better than homogeneous teams. However, it's not as simple as throwing a bunch of different people together and hoping that things work out, as this article points out.

Now if you're interested in something beyond abstract notions of "productivity" and why diversity matters, look at this. It's a soap dispenser that doesn't dispense soap to people who aren't white because the team didn't test it on other skin tones. Don't be that team.

I work on an amazing and very diverse team. I'm better because of the diversity in my team (I get to engage with people of different skill levels, from different perspectives, with different priorities, etc.) When building teams, looking entirely for a stack of uniformly excellent 10X engineers will be both costly and counterproductive. We focused on building a 10X team, as described in this article, and we did. I'm extremely happy on my team.

I work in a big IT company (100.000+ employee). Here is what I was told from an HR representative when I was promoted as a manager:

We need to hire smart and talented people. Smart and talented people can come from any background, including diverse gender, diverse sexualities, diverse skin color, diverse level of disability, etc...

If a division of the company turns out to be seen a toxic by a given demographic, we lose the ability to hire from this demographic.

For example, if you let lewd jokes, harassment, belittlement create a toxic environment for women, we lose 50% of our hiring prospect, which will result in having less choice from where to select talented people. As a result, you will have to work with dummies.

So, be open to diversity and work with smart people, or else you will have to work with dummies.

What I find funny is that I had to be promoted manager to hear this sensible argument. As long as I was a junior, all HR gave me as a justification was the usual BS ("diversity is cool, mmh 'kay? Don't be bad").

The general problem here is that the "merit" in meritocracy needs to be measured in some quantitative way. It's not an objective or absolute quantity. Organizations or teams that have a blind spot are often not aware that they have a blind spot and hence they won't be able to fill it.

Diversity helps you to broaden your definition of merit and create more balanced value system

If you're talking about diversity in terms of casting a wide net, then yes. It can provide different perspectives and protect a company from falling into an echo chamber. But the diversity in perspective is what matters.

If you have a collection of racially, ethnically, and spiritually diverse people who all went to Harvard, you're going to have an echo chamber.

Even your question is a bit loaded.

You're question suggests a false dichotomy in that EITHER a group is based on diversity OR it's meritocracy.

The implication being that if you hire the best, you won't get a diverse group.

That's the same as saying that people from some backgrounds aren't good enough to get hired by ordinary means.

I've had an interesting life, and have been exposed to all sorts of people from all sorts of backgrounds. A friend of mine is currently rebuilding himself from being homeless, for example and I did the same myself.

Racial and cultural backgrounds alone do not ensure the kind of diversity of perspective that is said to be sought.

Back to my Harvard example. You will have a group that seems to be very diverse, but will essentially be an echo chamber as their backgrounds and experiences will have more in common than different.

But, if you have a group where one person had come up from the mean streets, paid his own way to school while working nights and taking care of his sick aunt may, until he clawed his way up to the top, and another person who came from a wealthy background, and was able to make many high-level connections along the way, you'd have a diverse team, even if both were black, white Asian, Christian, Muslim, et cetera.

Another thing you need to be careful of is in not turning your diversity outreach into a "diversity hire mill", where you are excluding people because of their backgrounds either, nor should you hire someone without merit, as that will cause numerous other problems.

Example, You hire A and B through your diversity program. "A" is an all-star, brilliant in her work, and better than half your team coming right in the door, definitely has a future with your company. "B", is mediocre at best, has a bad attitude, knows that she's hired through the diversity program, and is using that as job security.

Comments will come (either publicly or privately) that "That's what you get for hiring people like "b". A will certainly feel the pressure as well. Even if "A"'s performance remains remarkable, or even improves, "A" might get labeled as a "diversity hire", pushed aside, and passed over for promotion, or worse, promoted out of the way and left to stagnate.

IF you want to eliminate bias, you can pass people resume's with no personal information on the, so that they don't know the person's background, and then screen from there, but if you go in with the attitude that the two are mutually exclusive, then you are, from the word go, accepting sopme people are just not good enough due to their race/color/creed. That's where you will ruin your company.

Just an idea: if you have a non-diverse clientele (all customers being of the same/similar background), then diversity might not bring a lot of advantages (at least where customer satisfaction is concerned).

However, if your customer base is more diverse (different backgrounds), then the presence of similar backgrounds in your company might foresee possible issues/questions the customer will have, which will make it easier and faster to respond to any customer demands.

As the other answers mention, there are potentially benefits from a more diverse team that, although they could theoretically be picked up as part of a measure of merit , in practice frequently aren't.

Aside from any actual benefits to the company though, from the perspective of people monitoring hiring practices diversity is much easier to measure than merit. This makes life much easier for HR and middle management types, who can report a 20% increase in new hire diversity as a win rather more easily than they can report a 20% increase in new hire merit. Since these people tend to be involved in advising on hiring policies, diversity related policies have a tendency to emerge.

Only if you make sure that the composition of your workforce matches the one of society, you can truly install a meritocratic system. Structures tend to perpetuate themselves. A less diverse workforce will tend to remain like this, while on the other hand, a more diverse workforce will also stay more diverse.

When your company is as diverse as society on all hierarchy levels, then it will be visible to everyone that anyone can make it to any position in the company. Only then you can truly hire people only based on their skills, because everyone, the hirer and the hiree will be aware that other non-related factors will not matter. Until then you will have to compensate for structural disadvantages of some applicants in your hiring process. The goal can not be to hire for diversity forever, but only when and as much as structural disadvantages are reflected in the company's workforce.

You are assuming that when you are installing a system of true meritocracy will make any focus on diversity unnecessary, since skill does not depend on race or gender. Since skill actually does not depend on race and gender, this assumption sounds good in theory, but it does not hold up in the real world.

You can install a system of "true meritocracy" in your company and try to enforce it with all kind of measures, but the truth is that it is impossible to build such a bubble and completely isolate it from the real world.

In our society there are many ways how people can be disadvantaged by race, gender, wealth, social group etc. Here are some examples:

• A woman who has kids is working on a part-time contract outperforms her coworkers on full-time contract, but her manager, whose wife stays at home with the kids, subconsciously (or consciously for that matter) feels that she can not fully focus on her job because "she also has to take care of her children" or he feels "sorry for the kids who need their mother". If she looks for a new job, she will do so from a position lower than warranted by her actual performance.


• A black person is not graded fairly in his oral exam because he happened to come across an examiner who secretly holds racist views.


• A smart kid from a poor family does not get good support at school, because her/his parents are busy to bring food on the table. It is expected from her/him to quickly find a paying job, because the family can not afford to maintan her/him in a higher eductation. At the same time a less gifted rich child will get all the support she/he needs by a paid tutor to attain good grades and will be supported financially by her/his parents during higher education.

All these people are at a disvantantage in a recruitment process that does not factor in the systemic effect of race, gender and other bias that is still present in our society. If, under these circumstances, you hire (solely) based on previous merit and not factor in those disadvantages, you will miss many good people who never had a chance to prove themselves. Compensating for lack of diversity will support other factors like fitness for your team and individual potential that are also important in the hiring process.

This question very much depends on the particular vertical (business task) you are trying to accomplish.

As an example, in my team of assembly-line workers, I don't really care how diverse my workforce is; no amount of diversity is going to tell you how to put the square peg into the square hole any better, or explain to me that putting the square peg into the round hole is "a better idea". I want people who can put the square peg into the square hole, and do that many times over and over.

Conversely, if I am hiring for an HR department, I want to bring in all the best people from all walks of life and experience level. If I have an HR team that only knows how to hire from University X, then I'm going to get less applicants as opposed to knowing how to hire from University X, University Y, and College Z. Some proportion of that knowledge can come from diversity (e.g. if University X is overwhelmingly Asian, Y is overwhelmingly white, and Z is overwhelmingly Latin, then I'd want an HR person who's Asian, one who's white, and one who's Latin(o/a)). (At this point I should clarify that I'm Canadian and hence "University" and "College" are not synonyms for me, and there is a different skill set involved in hiring from a University vs. a College)

So basically, you want to think critically about what sort of business vertical you are referring to, and whether it's on the "hard skills" side of the spectrum, where there exists a "correct answer" (or a spectrum of answers which can be graded as objectively better/worse than others) and you want people who can arrive at that "correct answer", or the "soft skills" end of the spectrum where people with different life experiences may have important information to provide that is relevant to that cause.

People from diverse backgrounds can have perspectives that you otherwise lack - this much was said already. I think, however, that one needs to approach the problem with some common sense rather than jump on the "diversity at all costs PR" bandwagon. A diverse group of incompetent people will not be able to compete in any way with a non-diverse competent group of people.

Think of a purely-technical IT meeting; including people from the marketing department would certainly make the group of people present during that meeting more diverse and definitely give you some (possibly VERY) fresh perspectives. But you're likely just going to LOSE productivity as said marketing people aren't likely going to be able to contribute. Unless, of course, it's not a purely technical meeting and you want to discuss some actual marketing stuff or said marketing people double as, say, competent technical consultants...

In other words; lowering the entry bar to hire people with a more diverse background purely for the diversity "factor" is silly - you still want competence, after all. At the same time it's equally wrong to assume incompetence of anyone with said diverse background.

Diversity of a group may only become an asset when the group is already competent to begin with.

I think Glen did a great job explaining the why of diversity, so let me take a different perspective.

Do diversity and inclusion actually have any benefits over using raw meritocratic measurements in interviews?

I'd argue that in a perfect world they lead to the exact same outcome. That skills are perfectly distributed and so are opportunities.

But the world is not perfect and so opportunities are not evenly distributed and neither are skills distributed in the same way as people's talents, simply because you need experience and practice to get the most out of raw talent.

So companies know that to attract the most talented, driven crowd you need to think of peoples' background.

Steve Jobs's dad was a Syrian immigrant, the Kennedys were Irish, Barack Obama mixed race, and Sergey Brin (Google) was born in Russia.

Companies should be terrified that they could be missing out on people like that, because they might have a background that is hard to recognize.

why do unbiased people believe that some (non-PR) utility would be provided to their companies by hiring a more diverse staff instead of simply relying on meritocracy itself?

Human beings, including "unbiased people" are capable of believing nearly anything for any reason. But when people form any given belief, they don't typically change it unless it is shown to be demonstrably wrong in some way that is costly to ignore.

Belief in diversity's benefits is a relatively non-costly belief for HR personnel, and those benefits are difficult to measure objectively. If the benefits of diverse hiring practices don't actually exist, the effort in seeking additional diversity doesn't negatively impact the company much or at all.

Consider that top companies like Google still have 80% male development teams because that's who they can find, even after spending lots of time and money to try to hire more women. It's not like if a software company can only find 3 white dudes no matter how hard it tries, it won't eventually hire one of the white dudes instead of keep the position open forever.

There are some very good answers, here, but here is my personal view on this:

First, I am VERY MUCH in favor of a meritocratic approach to hiring and promotions, but the key to that is OBJECTIVE RATING of a person's "merits." I've seen this tried in educational systems, and when an incompetent administrator is put in charge of rating faculty, they tend to reward the incompetent ones because they fear the competent and they live in terror of the talented. There is also the fact that many have a subconscious bias to people "like them," because we still have that tribal brain thing going on behind all our "politically correct" modern-day values. Because of this, a meritocracy is a very difficult thing to achieve.

Second, diversity has nothing to do with merit, either positive or negative. Talented people come in all races and genders, and you should embrace that idea. Idiots do, too. But diversity adds something: It specifically adds "People who don't think like you do." Especially in knowledge and creative jobs, having different thought processes involved in development can mean making a better product, both because of approaches you wouldn't have thought of and cultural norms that you are trapped in.

An example from me: We are "conditioned" here in the Western world to think Red = bad and Green = good. Well, I got that notion kicked out of my head in an afternoon when I had a colorblind person who was born in China work one of my apps. First, they didn't see the difference between red and green, and second, in his culture, red is GOOD.

Now, that's a pretty simplistic anecdote, but it's a powerful one when you think about all the UI and language decisions you make in software, and all the color choices you make in art.

Diversity is likely to have inherent benefits to the organization, beyond just the PR value.

The problem with just going by a pure meritocracy is that the whole is often greater than the sum of its parts. If you hire the best people, but they all share some common biases, you will end up with a biased product. Hiring people with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints means you'll get a wider svariety of ideas, which can then be weighed against each other, with hopefully the best one being selected. And if you want your product to be acceptable and attractive to the widest customer base, it's helpful to have designers and developers that include people across a similar spectrum.

This can be viewed as the social analogy of the benefit of sexual reproduction over asexual reproduction -- mixing genes improves the species because you don't get stuck in a genetic rut.

On a slightly different tack from all the other answers: regardless of whether or not it adds value to a company by improving the quality of its workforce, it does add value to the company in a different way: it adds a protective screen against getting sued for discriminatory hiring practices. By providing lip service to the ideal of "diversity", they can cover their bases to protect themselves.

There's an advantage of a diverse workforce that hasn't been mentioned yet. Diversity is fun. Armands answer quotes an article stating that If a division of the company turns out to be seen a toxic by a given demographic, we lose the ability to hire from this demographic.

It goes further than that. I'm a white male and I have studied and worked in both diverse (40 students from 25 countries from all continents) and non-diverse environments (>80% male, all white, single country, 30–60 years old). I find the diverse environment simply much more fun to be in. If I can choose to do the same work in two different environments, one where everybody looks like me, or another with a team consisting of young and old men and women from all inhabited continents, I will choose the latter. A diverse environment simply makes for more interesting colleagues. A diverse workplace is more fun — not only for the minority, but also for the majority. Monoculture is simply boring.

Not everybody will share this view, but for those who do, diversity certainly provides something that meritocracy does not.

"Diversity" could be economical or political

• Economical "diversity" is pretty straightforward - you hire ( H-1B visa) or outsource jobs to people from countries with lower wages or hourly rates. There is well known stereotype of Indian developer, as someone who could produce code for fraction of US developer cost. This type of "diversity" is usually practiced by companies that in quality/price ratio tend to favor reducing price, and since it affects bottom line favorably it is common occurrence.




• Political "diversity" is euphemism for anti-White, anti-male agenda. This kind of "diversity" is not created to improve economical results of given company. Instead, its main purpose is to change society. There are two kinds of companies that employ this kind of "diversity" :

1) Large companies with sizeable share of the market, often monopolistic position, large capital, "too big to fail" . One example would be Google with their well-known anti-White and anti-male policy . Such companies usually create superficial (often managerial ) jobs for protected minorities, spend loot of resources on their public image, force their political ideology on employees, but still expect from those same male and White employees to pull weight for everyone else.

Since they do have lot of cash and favorable position on the market, their "diversity" policies do not affect them immediately. Still, even large companies sometimes get burned by their PC agenda : one example would be Yahoo and their ruinous experience with Marissa Mayer - she managed to bring value of the company from $44.6 billion (Microsoft offer in 2008) to $4.83 billion (sale to Verizon in 2016).

2) Smaller companies with politically inclined owners. These are often startups or former startups acquired by investors. While some of them have good ideas and sometimes interesting business model, when they start pushing "diversity" they usually do not last long. Unlike big companies mentioned before, they could not offer neither large salaries nor "fame" and references that could be used latter. Therefore, employees who become victims of discrimination simply abandon them.

Anyway, if you are White and male and find yourself working one of such companies, it is usually best to jump ship at first opportunity. In the long run, even if you get paid handsomely, it is not worth of effort to get constantly berated for something that is not your fault, by people who are undeservingly above you.