The comparison between the general population and the workplace, especially with regards to race and sex, once again has become fashionable. The usual follow-on is to demand that action be taken to align the organization’s individual characteristics to those of that larger population. Usually, those who raise these points consider that there are three ways to accomplish this goal, that focus on the humans in the organization:
- Implement/improve a rules-based order, e.g. by rooting out discriminatory practices (or implementing/increasing them)
- Subtract people in over-represented categories, by firing, attrition, or strict gatekeeping
- Add people in the under-represented categories by expanded hiring and retention
and the more sophisticated people will talk about the “pipeline” of talent and begin to consider the matter of the larger population, by:
- Making education and training cheaper and easier to access
- Popularizing certain professions and encouraging participation in feeder activities like math clubs
However, the larger population’s composition also can be altered by measures such as:
- Expelling people from the country
- Opening the floodgates to foreigners
- Shunning and discouraging people from entering a profession or participating in a hobby
- Entering into an agreement with other industry players to avoid hiring the underrepresented in general, so that the number of underrepresented job-seekers eventually dwindles, and hence the actual composition of hired individuals changes
Generally, the means by which an imbalance could be altered can be classified as:
- Positive-sum approaches that increase the overall size of the organization/labor pool/population
- Zero-sum approaches that churn the organization/labor pool/population amongst the groups
- Negative-sum approaches that decrease the overall size of the organization/labor pool/population
Whether a positive-sum approach is feasible, completely depends on the activity and specific economic situation. For example, there already are too many farmers/not all the people who want to farm full-time, can, and profit is erratic given the relatively high amounts of capital. Therefore, a farmer pipeline-expanding activity is grossly wasteful. By contrast, if we were (mostly incorrectly) to consider that police/law enforcement labor pool shortages in the American Empire and worldwide, were specifically due to underrepresented groups’ disregard or mistrust of the profession, and not to other factors such as the hazards of the job, not good pay, etc., then taking the various measures to build popular trust or regard amongst those groups for the profession, could be a positive-sum action that increases group and overall welfare. In the case of the general population, worldwide, there is no need to increase the population, but only to train and shape the people who already exist. In very specific countries such as Japan, it might make sense to have some small increase in population, but as overall, Japan exhibits signs of excessive population concentration, so increases should be targeted/are not generally beneficial.
One should note that in positive-sum situations, that it does not matter whether you add over-represented or under-represented groups: if you are short of police, adding police from any group clearly is helpful, even if you aggravate demographic imbalances.
As positive-sum approaches are not always feasible, we must therefore consider that in many cases the zero-sum or negative-sum approaches, are the only means that could accomplish the diversity goals.
Of the measures mentioned in this writing, the only one that is zero-ish sum, is the implementation of rules-based order. However, such systems increase organizational personnel alignment to the dimensions of such a system, which may not have anything to do with the desired relative diversity distribution. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see that implementation of these systems decreases relative diversity on various dimensions: if you create absolute rewards based on formal education and training success, then all of the people who learned by experience and on-the-job know-how, now get reshuffled and demoted, which likely isn’t the desired effect if the goal is to encourage diversity of thought via the proxy of diversity of background and clique. One only could expect such a system to increase relative diversity on average, if an organization had clear weaknesses/biases in personnel evaluation; even then, if an organization improves its meritocratic focus, if word gets around, differently motivated people now want to join and advance in the organization, and when incorporated, those people may not bring the desired diversity. In other words, a zero-sum/churn approach, may not only churn in unintended ways with regards to the existing workforce, but may also change the characteristics of attrition and retention, which also may churn the workforce composition in unintended ways.
There certainly are rules-based systems that directly target diversity, and their practical impact will be similar to the negative-sum approaches, although presumably of less magnitude, since the size of the organization’s workforce is more or less staying the same.
In the case of negative-sum approaches, the members of the targeted/over-represented groups, facing a direct threat to their position, gain a clear incentive to support the changes in the overall labor pool/population that would protect their positions. That is, the members of the targeted groups now would find it in their economic and perhaps also their political best interests to support measures such as partitioning the country, overt intimidation against minorities, inefficient guilding/unions/cartels, and perhaps even genocide. Since the over-represented groups, almost by definition/statistical roll-up, tend to constitute a majority of the population/workforce/wealthy/strong, this means that the majority of the population now is being set against the minority, which aggravates any original problem e.g. of racism, and creates a new problem of out-group hostility if one did not already exist.
Hence, with the positive-sum approaches (if economically sensible) being helpful regardless of the current makeup of the organization, the zero-sum approaches being uncertain actually to conform the relative diversity to the desired, and the negative-sum approaches certainly being unhelpful, we should not use relative diversity as a normative ideal.