I believe those studies but correlation does not equal causation. I think the real reason that more diverse boards do better (if they do) is that the company hires people more based on talent and other metric which don’t discriminate, vs ones like patrimony. Forced diversity just sidesteps the problem because the company can still use bad metrics.

moreover, diversity of viewpoints borne of diversity of life experiences will better represent the search space in any decision-making. that's what makes diversity better, all other things being equal, which potentially then leads to better financial performance. it doesn't mean that any one decision will definitely be better, but that the totality of decision-making will be better on average than a less diverse decision-making group. this is a pretty reliable result in group dynamics/decision-making research.

There's a little bit of a systemic epistemic bias around this- diversity is socially desirable, so positive results are more likely to get published, get into the media, get shared, get remembered.

I wonder what would happen if we found out that people of similar backgrounds work better together? The reasoning of increasing shareholders value would still apply. Would we start implementing de facto segregated workplaces?

Maybe GP is thinking about the Gartner research measuring “performance” (can’t recall exactly how they define that though).

https://www.gartner.com/en/human-resources/trends/workforce-...