The Diversity Leadership Fallacy

Exploring the efficacy and ethics of diversity initiatives

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has taken America by storm. It’s in almost every public school, college, corporation, and organization you can imagine, including pharmaceutical companies, entertainment companies, and even the United States Department of Defense.

To its critics, DEI represents an insidious Neo-Marxist virus infecting the culture of the West, one that could spell the doom of democracy, critical thinking, and Enlightenment values, leading to the death of the West and America with it.

To its advocates, it is a clarion call to fight what they believe is the greatest struggle of our era—racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, along with all other forms of identity-based injustice. It is sword, shield, and holy book in the fight for so-called social justice.

Those less zealous yet still supportive of DEI believe that surface-level diversity, particularly of race, ethnicity, and gender, can lead to positive workplace outcomes, such as better leadership. For example, HR consulting company Zenefits recommends that companies “prioritize hiring executives, directors, managers, and other senior leaders from diverse backgrounds,” which includes factors like “gender, gender identities, ages, abilities and special needs, races, sexual orientations, religious backgrounds and beliefs, cultures, and nationalities.”

But even this more moderate brand of DEI falsely correlates leadership ability with diversity status and runs the risk violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Rather than treating each person as an individual with unique attributes, this brand of DEI relies on dubious claims that a person brings benefits to an organization merely by virtue of possessing certain identity-based characteristics. Supporters of diversity-based initiatives therefore often embrace the same kind of broad generalizations about race, sex, and other identity characteristics that civil rights laws were meant to counteract.   

Diversity researchers Alice H. Eagly and Jean Lau Chin are typical of scholars who attempt to justify DEI initiatives based on broad assumptions about identity. In arguing that surface-level diversity leads to better leadership, they say that “leaders and followers from diverse identity groups generally face some degree of pressure to behave like leaders from the majority group” while continuing to “express their own cultures to some extent” and this increases their multicultural competence while explaining some of the challenges that hold minorities back.

These claims rely on two fallacious assumptions that certain characteristics flow necessarily from a person’s identity. First, the authors assume that leaders and followers from “diverse identity groups” feel pressure to behave like the leaders from majority groups because these leaders are from a “majority” group, not because these leaders are in a position of authority that these “diverse” people may want to move into one day. It’s common for people to imitate the behaviors of those they want to be like or those whose benefits they wish to attain. This is why professional speakers study famous speakers and speeches, artists study great artists and art, writers study great writers and writing, and businesspeople study the entrepreneurial strategies of startup titans. We imitate that which we wish to become, and this isn’t necessarily predicated on race or gender.

The second assumption is one that we see far too often: that race and culture go together. Race can be correlated with culture in some cases, but it isn’t all the time. A black man born and raised in Houston, Texas is going to have a very different culture and “lived experience” than a black man born and raised in Ghana or London. A Hispanic woman born and raised in New York City is going to have a very different culture and “lived experience” than a Hispanic woman born and raised in Guatemala or Spain. And a white man born and raised in Nebraska or Oregon is going to have a very different cultural and “lived experience” than a white man born and raised in Sweden, South Africa, or Italy. Race doesn’t always correlate with culture.

Eagly and Chin continue with more broad and unsubstantiated assumptions about identity, saying non-white leaders “may be especially concerned about integrity and justice as they relate to the inclusion and fair treatment of individuals from diverse identity groups.” Although this may sound like a reasonable assumption on the surface, it assumes that these non-white leaders are concerned with inclusion and fairness rather than gaining competence, wealth, power, authority, prestige, or other benefits, let alone that they’ve personally experienced based exclusion and injustice that would make them uniquely sensitive to other minorities’ needs. This assumption also is blind to the fact that there are millions of non-minority people concerned with inclusion and justice for people of “diverse identity groups,” as evidenced by all the white people who fought to abolish slavery and secure civil rights for minorities and continue to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice” today. It is also blind to all the “diverse” people who have committed horrible crimes against other “diverse people,” such as Idi Amin (aka the Butcher of Uganda), Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong, as well as every Hutu who participated in the Tutsi genocide, every non-white person who owned a non-white slave, and every non-white soldier who has ever fought in a civil war against people of the same “diverse” group, to name a few.

Eagly and Chin’s claims include many other unsubstantiated generalizations about identity: that “executives from sexual minority groups might be especially adaptable and therefore embrace change;” that minority leaders may gain certain advantages from their “ability to modify and switch between minority and majority perspectives depending on their immediate cultural context”; that people from minority groups sometimes engage in a “strength-based rhetoric” which may involve “explicit claims that their group’s way of leading is better than those of the heterosexual White man who traditionally have exercised leadership;” and that “individuals belonging to diverse identity groups are often good leaders [because] the experiences that such individuals have had because of their differences from the majority group do confer special qualities.”

All of these claims rely on broad generalizations about beneficial leadership characteristics that supposedly flow from identity.  But we have evidence that the surface-level diversity that Eagly, Chin, and others like them are obsessed with does not necessarily contribute to good leadership on its own.

For example, in a rebuttal to Eagly and Chin, University of Maryland researchers Kristen M. Klein and Mo Wang provide four reasons why surface-level diversity does not equate to strong leadership.

First, we shouldn’t assume that just because someone belongs to a certain identity group they’ve automatically been a victim of discrimination. 

Second, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that individuals who have experienced discrimination experience long-term consequences to their well-being, but this is not necessarily true either. 

Third, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that those who have experienced discrimination have integrated these experiences into their life in positive, constructive ways—specifically in ways that improve their leadership abilities—rather than in negative, destructive ways, such as becoming bitter, resentful, or hopeless.  And finally, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that a person’s surface-level characteristics expose them to more character-building adversity than non-surface-level characteristics, such as growing up in a low socioeconomic background or a single-parent household. But of course this mistakenly assumes that a white person from an impoverished single-parent household surrounded by drugs and crime would have faced less character-building adversity than a black woman who grew up in a safe, wealthy community with two loving, supportive parents. 

You cannot measure the adversity or discrimination a person has experienced purely by their surface-level characteristics. Further, there is no correlation between a person’s surface-level characteristics and the content of their character, or the competency of their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Those who suggest there is a connection are not destroying negative stereotypes, as they may claim. They are merely switching negative stereotypes to a different identity group and continuing the cycle of ignorance and resentment. 

As Klein and Wang point out, “a substantial body of research on deep- and surface-level diversity in the workplace has repeatedly shown that whereas the negative impacts of surface-level diversity decrease over time in workgroups, deep-level similarity (e.g., in values, goal orientations, and personality) consistently predicts positive workplace outcomes (e.g., turnover, job attitudes, team performance).”

While it’s true that some surface-level traits tend to vary with deeper-level qualities—women tend to rank higher on average in the personality trait of agreeableness than men—this doesn’t mean that these traits always vary together, that they have a strong relationship with one another, or that one causes the other. We cannot derive deep-level qualities, such as beliefs, attitudes, values, and skills, from surface-level traits and use these as proxies in employment decisions. Yet this is exactly what many DEI supporters propose.

Hiring and promoting employees, especially for leadership positions, based even in part on surface-level diversity causes enormous harm. Why should employees trust or accept the outcome of a hiring or promotion decision if they know that one of the qualities under scrutiny is an arbitrary characteristic unjustly treated as a competency? Why should people remain committed to an organization if they realize that the trajectory of their future is partially based on surface-level characteristics they can’t change?  Would you truly feel valued as a whole, multi-faceted human being if you knew or suspected that your organization assessed your qualifications based on the color of your skin or your sex? And how could you trust the people around you if you knew that they, too, may have been selected because of their surface-level qualities, not their competence?

However well-intentioned DEI initiatives may be, they rely on fundamentally flawed assumptions and broad, unfounded generalizations about identity, which reinforce old negative stereotypes and create new ones. Competence, not identity, should be the primary criteria for hiring, promotion, and leadership, not arbitrary surface-level qualities like race, ethnicity, or gender. 

Every time an organization encourages people to divide themselves by these surface-level characteristics, the organization entrenches stereotypical thinking and all but guarantees negative organizational outcomes. We shouldn’t encourage people to shackle themselves to stereotypes and call it liberation. Instead, we should hire and promote people based only on their job-relevant experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics that have real value. 

We should train leaders to foster shared organizational values, goals, and attitudes among their subordinates which will contribute to deep-level similarities within their teams and the organization over time. We must look beyond the surface and stop pandering to those who would trap us in outdated thinking wrapped in a shiny new public relations pitch.

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