Who Supports Diversity Policies? It Depends on the Policy

Since the 1980s, companies have increasingly adopted diversity policies to improve the representation of women and racial minorities in the workplace. Today over 95% of companies with at least 1,000 employees have instituted programs to increase diversity and inclusion within their ranks.

Despite this, we know remarkably little about how people feel about these programs, and even less about why they feel the way they do. This is a major knowledge gap. Research shows that diversity programs are more effective when workers support them— and when done correctly, they offer great opportunities to improve workplace equity and, ultimately, firm performance. At their worst, however, they can stimulate resistance and actually create an even more challenging environment for underrepresented workers.

To help companies take full advantage of these programs and close this knowledge gap, we conducted a study guided by the following three research questions:

1. How supportive are workers of the diversity policies at their companies?

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1. How do policy characteristics impact levels of support?
2. How do workers’ social attitudes impact levels of support?

Part One: How supportive are workers of the diversity policies at their companies?

We analyzed data from a 2015 survey of 1,862 randomly selected Latinx, black, and white people working for wages/salary (not self-employed) in the United States. Because the survey was conducted with a random sample of adult Americans, there was broad representation across industries and occupations. By virtue of using a large and diverse sample, we were able to examine overall levels of support for eight common diversity policies, as well as identify whether these attitudes differed by demographics. Here are the eight types of policies we studied:

• Generic: policies that address inequity in the workplace
• Targeted recruitment: policies that actively recruit minorities to apply for job openings
• Voluntary training: policies that offer voluntary diversity training to employees
• Mandatory training: policies that require diversity training for all employees
• Mentorship: policies that provide underrepresented workers with mentors who can assist them with job and career changes
• Formal hiring policies: policies that rely on formalized/documented criteria for making decisions about hiring and promotion
• Diversity office: policies that establish a special office or committee that identifies barriers to diversity and works to remove those barriers
• Diversity goals: polices that establish numerical goals for addressing the underrepresentation of certain groups in the workplace

Looking at overall levels of support across policies, voluntary training and the establishment of a diversity office received the most support. This is good news, since these two policies have been proven to improve workplace diversity. Unfortunately, however, two other policies that have also been shown to be effective strategies, targeted recruitment and the establishment of accountable diversity goals, were the least popular. We believe these differences in support result from workers interpreting the latter policies as more compulsory than the former. As other research has shown, workers are more likely to resist diversity initiatives that are forced upon them.

Comparing levels of support between respondents, we found major differences by race and gender. Women, black, and Latinx workers are, as a whole, more supportive of diversity policies than men and white people. Across seven of the eight policies, black workers reported the highest levels of support, followed by Latinx workers, with whites showing the greatest opposition. Across gender, women reported higher levels of support than men for all but one of the policies, where women and men held similar opinions.

Part 2: How do policy characteristics impact levels of support?

We wanted to explore exactly why these discrepancies exist. Part of the survey we analyzed was designed to answer this question by identifying how certain policy characteristics impact levels of support. When completing the survey, respondents were randomly assigned to either a module with questions related to diversity policies aimed to improve the representation of women, or a module with questions about policies aimed to improve the representation of racial minorities. Additionally, the justification of the policies was randomized. Respondents were told one of three possible justifications:

1. The policy was needed to address discrimination.
2. The policy was needed to improve representation.
3. No justification was given.

We found that whites supported policies aimed at increasing the representation of women more than policies geared toward racial minorities (43% and 23% of those we surveyed, respectively). Black and Latinx workers supported the latter policies more.

The framing of diversity policies also played a large role in how they were perceived by workers — particularly policies aimed at increasing the representation of racial minorities. Across race and gender, we found that people are more likely to support workplace policies when they are framed as a means to address discrimination, as opposed to when they are framed as a means to increase diversity or when the policy has no clear mission. Looking at opinions toward a generic diversity policy, nearly 50% of respondents expressed support when it was framed as needed to address discrimination, while only 38% supported the policy when it was framed as needed to improve diversity.

Part 3: How do workers’ social attitudes impact levels of support? 

In the first two parts of our study, we uncovered how people feel about diversity policies and how policy characteristics influence their levels of support, but we still hadn’t answered the most important question: why do they feel that way? To answer this question, we used the last part of the survey to determine the relationship between respondents’ beliefs about social inequality and their attitudes toward workplace diversity policies. Our investigation was driven by a hypothesis that an individual’s attitude about social issues has implications for the workplace.

Our analysis uncovered that people who felt that gender/race discrimination caused women and black workers to have worse jobs and lower pay than whites were more supportive of workplace diversity policies. Meanwhile, workers who felt that race/gender inequality was caused primarily through educational or training differences showed lower relative levels of support.

White people and men were the least likely to believe discrimination causes race/gender inequality. These workers put more relative weight on racial/gender differences in job training. This is a major reason why they expressed some of the lowest levels of support for diversity policies.