Harvard Business Review: The Most Common DEI Practices Actually Undermine Diversity

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Our research draws on data from Dobbin and Kalev across 806 organizations collected between 1971 and 2015, examining the effect of management practices on diverse representation in managerial roles. We extend beyond their work by examining how frequently each management practice is utilized in organizations. Contrasting interventions’ effectiveness and prevalence of use in organizations provides crucial insights into why organizations are not making greater progress toward diverse representation.


Effective Practices for Enhancing Management Diversity

Hiring Chief Diversity Officers and maintaining diversity task forces are the most effective management practices. Both practices have the advantage of creating formal accountability for promoting diversity. Having jobs explicitly focused on DEI ensures that DEI remains a strategic priority and empowers employees to make meaningful changes. Despite their impact, paid diversity roles are only utilized by 10-20% of large employers and are decreasing in prevalence as organizational support for diversity programs has become politically polarized.

Effective Practices for Enhancing Management Diversity

Hiring Chief Diversity Officers and maintaining diversity task forces are the most effective management practices. Both practices have the advantage of creating formal accountability for promoting diversity. Having jobs explicitly focused on DEI ensures that DEI remains a strategic priority and empowers employees to make meaningful changes. Despite their impact, paid diversity roles are only utilized by 10-20% of large employers and are decreasing in prevalence as organizational support for diversity programs has become politically polarized.

Formal mentoring, family-accommodating practices, targeted recruitment, empowering training, and setting diversity goals were each effective in advancing diverse representation but were also not widely implemented.

Mentoring fosters career success by providing coaching on work-related goals, facilitating developmental assignments, and having someone advocate on mentees’ behalf.

Family-friendly practices (childcare, flextime, and parental leave) can accommodate the disproportionate work-life challenges experienced by women and people of color. In heterosexual married couples, women spend substantially more time on caregiving than their husbands, even among couples with egalitarian earnings. Relative to white parents, Black parents are more likely to quit a job, turn down a job, or change jobs due to childcare challenges. Ensuring that employees are not stigmatized for utilizing family-friendly practices is imperative for these programs to increase diverse representation.

Targeted recruitment, empowering training (training that teaches managers and employees to foster DEI rather than scolding them to avoid harassment and discrimination), and setting diversity goals each involve employees as change agents, encouraging them to cultivate a diverse and inclusive workforce. By treating employees as well-meaning citizens rather than offenders, employees are more likely to monitor their behavior and direct efforts toward increasing workforce diversity.

Notably, organizations implement family-friendly practices with moderate frequency, while other effective practices, such as targeted recruitment, empowering training, and setting diversity goals, are implemented infrequently.

Practices with Mixed Effects on Management Diversity

Cross-training, employee resource groups, self-managed teams, and skills training yielded mixed results in promoting managerial diversity. These practices either increase managerial representation for some underrepresented groups while decreasing representation for others or have minimal effects on managerial diversity. Effects are often mixed across demographic groups because underrepresented groups vary in participation in these interventions. For instance, white women are more likely to have a college degree than Black Americans and Latinos, which is often a prerequisite for managerial training.

Counterproductive Practices That Hinder Diverse Representation

Four of the most pervasive management practices — performance evaluations, diversity and harassment training, grievance procedures, and job tests for managers (standardized reading and writing tests or assessments of work-related skills) — are each counterproductive for attaining diverse managerial representation. While these practices may reduce legal trouble, they fail to increase managerial diversity.

These methods often exacerbate existing biases and fail to address systemic barriers, perpetuating organizational inequities. For example, diversity and harassment training programs frequently focus on blame, legal consequences, and unconscious bias. Employees are often told they are biased, and managers are informed that they will be held accountable if employees are accused of discrimination. This is counterproductive because employees tend to react with resistance and anger to these messages, inadvertently increasing discriminatory behavior. Employees may leave these courses either feeling like they have been accused of being bad people or deciding how questionable their behavior can become before crossing legal thresholds.