I don't believe there is any actual research about it. It doesn't even pass the smell test; why would a company of people who have a hard time relating to one another and socially meshing perform better? If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does), why are we trying to create the opposite situation in a company?

My guess is that is it possible to have great diversity of thought and experience while still having high social cohesion.

During the height of immigration in the US, there was high social cohesion within communities of people who came from the same country while still having great diversity of ideas across the nation as a whole.

My personal take on this is that it's the dark side of multiculturalism. The loss of the melting pot as a cultural meme was probably a sign of this. Social cohesion depends on a set of shared values. The "melting pot", for it's issues, provided the shared national myth to align and unify the disparate cultures.

Take that away, and you get the natural result of multiple cultures with drastically different moral codes, and no core to form around.

Interesting point on drastically different moral codes. I'm curious if, during the height of immigration to the US, the "melting pot" tended to consist of people immigrating from areas with mostly similar moral codes.

It appears that many immigrants retained much of their culture while still integrating in ways that let different cultures work together, but maybe that is because the moral foundation was similar enough to allow cohesion as a whole while retaining some sense of cultural identity.

> If homogeneity in a country increases social trust and other positive factors (it does)

Strong claim requires strong evidence, please.

Why would a company choose to do anything that didn't directly make money or cut cost? Companies often have to be compelled to do things where the ROI is measured in decades no?

There are real world examples that support that claim. Aflac always said "We hire everyone because we sell to everyone." Having internal people from different demographic groups helped with things like cultural sensitivity.

But I imagine that is only true if it's done right and probably just setting some kind of quota to hire more of X type demographic is not it.

Yeah sure, but that's the "product focus group" example. I've never seen any research that supports this claim for engineering groups, or accounting groups, or even HR itself.

I've seen various "innovation" studies that show more diverse teams come up with more ideas and are more productive, but less diverse teams think they are more productive. A quick internet search turns up https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbescoachescouncil/2019/09/09... for example.

For software, for example, there are plenty of characteristics that some engineers may think are constant that are definitely not. For example, the number of systems I've encountered that have baked in the idea that first/last name can not be changed (even though names are changed by not only trans people, but also any married woman in many cultures), or assumed people only had 2-3 names (some cultures as many as 4 last names are common), is long. When the name is used as part of a permanent key for all other data about an individual, fixing the issue can be a huge hassle.

Sure, a product focus group might eventually point these issues out, but no one's changing their name in a short-term focus group study.

Well the other example that came to mind is a criminal one so I opted to skip it. One of the most successful criminal organizations was willing to work with everyone instead of sticking to the historical "The Irish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Jewish criminals stick together and don't work with anyone else, the Italian criminals stick together...etc"

If you optimize for hiring the best rather than the best of X demographic you should see a higher bar being met. And this is where excluding other demographics potentially harm's outcomes but it's also the same reason just setting a quota probably doesn't improve performance.

Which one was that?

IIRC: Al Capone.

Probably hard to research.

How would you measure it for software engineering? Number of bugs? Number of features requested after initial project launch? Time to completion? All of those things have too many variables involved for any given organization. We already have a hard time measuring ability/quality of software engineers as it is.

Using that definition, isn't every pre-product-market-fit startup a focus group?

> Profitability is, of course, necessary to keep any business alive, and studies show that racial, ethnic, and gender diversity contribute to business success. A McKinsey & Company study of 366 companies revealed a statistically significant connection between diversity and financial performance. The companies in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have financial returns that were above their national industry median, and the companies in the top quartile for racial/ethnic diversity were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their national industry median.

https://www.nspe.org/resources/pe-magazine/july-2020/why-sho...

Are there any studies demonstrating causality? I can think of plenty of reasons diversity would correlate with success. For example, being based in a large city will have a lot of advantages for many businesses, along with having a more diverse hiring pool available that will naturally lead to a more diverse staff. But this doesn't suggest to me that adding a diversity quota or similar policy, all else being equal, will help a company succeed.

Confounded by the fact that succesful companies are located in growing areas (or move there), which is where immigrants also want to go. E.g. San Francisco.

I want to see this with some serious attempt to reduce the confounding.

Also it doesn't demonstrate cause and effect as stated in the quote. It's perfectly possible in this data that diversity makes companies less successful - but being successful in the first place is what creates the 'slack' that leads to a company pursuing diversity policies. They only go diversity when they can afford the cost incurred.

Would the study have been published if it came out the other way? If not, you have a form of inadvertent p hacking.

Cynically, couldn't these results be due to lower average wages offered to women and minorities?