Diversity comes in many flavors. I here compare three types—diversity of skin color and sex, cultural diversity, and ideological diversity—and offer some observations about the distinctive costs and benefits of each. I conclude that, holding all else equal, a group of people having diverse colors and sexes will enjoy modest institutional gains at low cost, while a group touting ideological diversity runs the risk of high transaction costs but wins a shot at great intellectual gains. Groups with high cultural diversity fall in between those two extremes.
Diversity of skin color and sex appears on the face of a group, thus offering ready proof that its selection, such as through hiring and promotion, was not tainted with invidious discrimination. Holding all else equal—assuming, specifically, that the racially and sexually diverse group does not possess above-average cultural and ideological diversity—the costs of intra-group transactions remain low. Thus, for instance, might a facially diverse group of culturally and ideologically similar people get along very smoothly. Think, here, of an elite law school where every professor has absorbed Ivy League norms and all lean moderately left. They might bicker, of course; law professors specialize in that. But such a culturally and ideologically uniform group is not likely to host nasty public fights about ballot initiatives or the like.
Are there downsides to pursuing diversity of skin color and sex in hiring and promotion? Not if you can find enough well-qualified candidates, and not if you avoid discriminating against candidates for blameless having an uninteresting color or sex. Happily, it is not too hard to satisfy both conditions, these days.
Cultural diversity proves harder to document, and runs some risk of increasing intra-group transaction costs. Someone brought up solely within the confines of respectable East Coast institutions will have to work a bit to understand a peer raised Mormon, in Utah's backcountry. So, too, might differences of sexual orientation (which like cultural differences generally do not appear on a person's face) sometimes lead to innocent misunderstandings. Holding equal for other sorts of diversity, however, cultural differences offer many charms and few serious costs. Most of us, and especially those of us in academia, enjoy meeting friendly people with exotic backgrounds. When we share ideologies, moreover, meeting fellow travelers who differ from us suggests that our most heartfelt values transcend race, sex, and culture—a comforting, if somewhat smug, idea.
Ideological diversity, standing alone, proves at least as hard to document as cultural diversity—it does not appear on a person's face nor even, typically, in a person's dress or hairstyle—and much more likely to raise intra-group transaction costs. Religious differences prove largely intractable, though in polite society we tend to keep them private. Political differences, at least in American institutions, threaten to burst out into loud and public disagreements, however. Such frank exchanges can help each side to hone its arguments, of course, and thus offers the prospect of considerable gains both to the disputants and the group that harbors them both. But if local norms do not temper the tone and proper boundaries of ideological debate, transactions costs can easily soar, making it hard for a group to manage even run-of-the-mill functions efficiently.
In sum: diversity of skin color and sex offers few costs and modest benefits; cultural diversity creates slightly higher transaction costs but compensates with intriguing charms; and ideological diversity presents a high risk/high return strategy for institutions devoted to generating new and useful ideas.
[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, and MoneyLaw.]
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Three Kinds of Diversity
Sunday, February 18, 2007
Ignorant Bliss in Hiring Legal Academics
Academics tend to favor the disclosure of all credible and interesting facts. Consider, for example, the post in which I recited figures, originally collected and published by the American Association of Law Schools (AALS), quantifying how various categories of candidates had done in landing legal academic jobs. Some readers evidently regretted that I had aired the data at all, apparently judging it as flawed beyond redemption and as dangerously likely to inflame animus against affirmative action. I found more convincing, however, arguments that the post should have analyzed the data and detailed its limitations. On that view, I erred by saying too little rather than too much.
Nonetheless, I am somewhat sympathetic to the notion that a little well-placed ignorance might improve the AALS's faculty recruitment services. As I mentioned in my prior post, the AALS collects information about candidates for legal academic jobs and uploads it into an electronic Faculty Appointment Registry (FAR). The form that the AALS gives to candidates invites them to classify themselves by sex and race. Employers can use a web-based interface to run a variety of searches on the FAR database. Notably, the AALS allows would-be employers to run searches for "female" or "minority" candidates. It does not, in contrast, allow a would-be employer to run a search for "male" or "non-minority" candidates. Why?
Having learned the hazards of skimping on caveats, let me emphasize that the curiously circumscribed search functions of the FAR database do not prove that the AALS encourages, or that any law school engages in, the preferential treatment of women or minority candidates. Perhaps the AALS selectively limits searches so as to protect it against baseless claims that it facilitates bias in favor of men or non-minority candidates, to the disfavor of women or minority ones. Or perhaps the AALS regards allocating scarce interview slots on the basis of race or sex as no more than affirmative action qua outreach. At this point, I honestly do not know.
Even if the AALS has selectively curtailed FAR database searches in order to facilitate the preferential treatment of women and minority candidates, moreover, it might not constitute a legal problem. I do not pretend to be an expert in employment or civil rights law and so cannot predict what a court would say about such a practice. With all those caveats granted, though, it surely does not strain credulity to imagine someone complaining that to choose interviewees on the basis of their sex or race fails to qualify as an equal opportunity, non-discriminatory hiring practice.
Perhaps, then, the AALS should consider some alternative ways of handling information about candidates in the FAR. It might, for instance, simply stop collecting data about the sex, race, or ethnicity of candidates for law teaching jobs. Or, perhaps better yet, it could collect that data but not allow schools to use it to run searches on the FAR database.
At the very least, AALS should consider making it easier for appointments committees using the FAR database to remain willfully blind to the sex, race, or ethnicity of candidates for law teaching jobs. That data now appears at the top of every FAR form. If you want to avoid learning it, you have to resort to strategically placing post-it notes on your computer screen. That hardly works perfectly, though. A better system would allow interviewers to automatically blank out information about the sex, minority status, and name of each candidate. Even if the AALS does not itself think that equal opportunity, non-discriminatory hiring practices demand such measures, it would be nice if it could accommodate interviewers who think otherwise.
[Crossposted to MoneyLaw.]