Discussion 1

Distinguish Between Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity" and "inclusion" are not synonymous terms, and in this module, you will explore the different meanings of the two words from a practical point of view with Professor Nishii. You will have an opportunity to review a classic case in which the effects of labeling and stereotypes were observed among children and discuss the outcomes with your peers. You will investigate how stereotypes influence people's thinking and perceptions, including "positive" stereotypes such as labeling people "high potentials." You will also examine recommended methods for reducing prejudice and applying stereotypes to decision making.

What's the distinction between diversity and inclusion? It's important to listen carefully to conversations about diversity and inclusion. Although they mean different things in practice — and inclusion mission statements acknowledge that this is the case — the terms "diversity" and "inclusion" are often used interchangeably. Many organizations have yet to adopt practices that truly promote inclusion.

Video transcript:

So the question that I just posed to you is whether or not there's a distinction between diversity and inclusion. Everyone refers to the two simultaneously. We are even saying D & I when we refer to this space and in my own personal experiences, talking to people who practice D & I in organizations, it seems to me, when we start to talk about it, there is a distinction that's being made between diversity and inclusion, with the idea that inclusion includes more of the intangibles. This idea of creating the kind of environment where people can be successful, where people feel valued in their work. But as my conversations continue, I start to feel like, actually, inclusion is a very slippery construct. There's a saying that I've heard, which I think is pretty, pretty, appropriate here. The idea that trying to define inclusion is like trying to nail jello to the wall, it's very difficult. And, so, what I want to do is really try to clarify what we mean by that, because often what I find is that as we talk about inclusion, and as I ask questions about what companies are doing to practice or facilitate inclusion, it ends up feeling like we're talking about classic diversity management again. That the focus ends up being on things like targeted recruiting, mentoring programs, being very careful about tracking pay and promotion rates, and providing diversity training and employee resource groups and the like. And so, it starts to feel like maybe it's old wine in new bottles. That is, we've been doing these things for quite a while. These practices have been in place and have been considered best practices for quite a while. So, what is it that's different, about the inclusion tag that we're now adding to the conversation? Do these practices really help to promote inclusion? Once we define what we mean by inclusion, I hope that we'll start to see that maybe these practices alone are not sufficient for also cultivating inclusion in organizations.

Diversity With Inclusion

Throughout this course, you will hear from several industry leaders from the field of diversity and inclusion. In this section, three leaders talk about expanding the focus from diversity to inclusion within their organizations. Listen for cues about where they and their organizations are in the journey from diversity to inclusion — in particular, how they define and operationalize inclusion.

Note: The job titles listed below were held by our experts at the times of their interviews.

Ana Duarte-McCarthy, managing director and chief diversity officer at Citi since 2002, is responsible for the development and integration of Citi’s global workforce diversity strategy for hiring and developing diverse talent, fostering an inclusive work environment, and ensuring management accountability.

Elizabeth Nieto assumed the role of global chief diversity and inclusion officer at MetLife in June 2012. Since then, the company has defined a new global D&I strategy, launched the Global D&I Council chaired by the MetLife CEO, and designed a four-year implementation plan focused on the development of women globally as well as on regional initiatives (e.g., people with different abilities, emerging talent, U.S. veterans, LGBT).

Lucida Plummer leads the Diversity Business Resource Networks and the Local Inclusion Action Teams at MetLife. As such, she's responsible for defining the strategy and ensuring the operating model for all of the networks in line with the Global Diversity & Inclusion office and the entire enterprise.

Video transcript:

It has been interesting the evolution of diversity and the inclusion of inclusion in part of this practice. What we learn is just having people that were different was not enough, if they were not engaged in the company. If they didn't feel that they had a say; they could influence the organization. So that adding of the word inclusion really changed the practice, not just by bringing people into their organization but developing, creating advancement and retention of those people that were different than the normal of each one of the organizations. 

I believe that in our case at MetLife, we also evolved and in the last couple of years, we had looked at different ways of creating inclusion. Mostly on giving managers the tools to re-think about the way they behave. We usually say, you don't do diversity and inclusion on Monday morning, and then you manage the rest of the week. You really do inclusion every day as a leader when you interact with your employees, with your teams. So, that's how we're talking about diversity and inclusion differently at MetLife. >> And I think that Elizabeth is right. The shift from just on diversity and why we're talking about inclusion, really has started to pull in a lot of different components of what you want to do with it, the toolkit. Breaking down, I think the misconceptions that people have had in the past about what it all means and why we're doing it, why it's important? We've been doing a lot of work around unconscious bias, which to me has really taken diversity and inclusion as a practice to another level. 

So that people understand not just what people perceive as the nice to do, the right thing to do, the politically correct thing to do, but the reasons why we are who we are because at the end of the day, it's not about having people not be who they are in the workplace, it's about celebrating the differences that people bring to the workplace, but understanding where everyone's coming from at the same time. >> I also think that inclusion has brought the white male into the conversation. Before, they felt that they were not part of this. And now when we're talking about inclusion, they see their role. And when we're talking about diversity, we're bringing diversity in the broader sense. So it's not about one characteristic, it's everything that you bring. It is to say bringing the whole self. And inclusion allows us to create that conversation that this not for some people, this is really for the organization. >> In the last decade there's been a big push to move from talking about diversity practices to diversity and inclusion, and I've been at Citi nearly 20 years. So in looking at the work we've done across those 20 years, the definite shift to inclusion has been more focusing on looking at the mix, which is what diversity has historically looked at. Who are you bringing in? Is that mix bringing in significant representation from the available labor pool? Does it take into consideration groups that historically have been underrepresented? And then the shift to inclusion really supported a mind shift to looking at how are people being perceived? Are they being fully developed? Are there any roadblocks in the way? And looking at it more proactively, sometimes I'd come to talk to people and they would immediately think it's like an audit. Let me get my metrics out, let me show you what we're doing. And what I want to talk to them about are people. How are these people doing? What's going on within the organization? What's the environment like? Let's look at who's being promoted. What's the succession plan look like? Are women part of that? What other diversity is part of that? And so it starts to look at it as a broader ecosystem. So I think it's an important shift because historically again, looking at making sure we're making these good faith efforts. Around the world generally that's women, and then as you start to look at different local countries, there are different groups that might be diverse in that country and historically haven't been part of the labor mix and then once individuals are in, now it's inclusion around are people feeling respected, valued? Are they feeling like they look up and see people that they can see as role models and not necessarily people that look like them but people who clearly value them.

 So it's an interesting shift and it's a very important one. Otherwise it's really a check-the-box exercise around ensuring that the mix is there, and not really looking at the broader impact of bringing people in who >> One of the things that we've been doing differently to support inclusion is, we're using the word first and foremost. The aspect of including the word creates conversation so, unless a why are you in diversity and inclusion? Why the semantics? 

So adding the context of the language is helpful because people start to then understand what it is in terms of this continuum. So, we bring in this diverse mix of individuals but the inclusion aspects look at ensuring the environment is supportive and also how we approach the work. So, a lot of what we do now focuses around development of the workforce and the lens that we bring to it is, looking at individuals across various strands, characteristics and understanding the various characteristics and how they might be supported more effectively. So as an example in the last number of years in the United States, there's been a real thrust on looking at the opportunity to recruit military veterans. So as we look at our recruitment and sort of recruitment programs, leadership development programs, even our employee resource groups or networks, are they groups that can just naturally bring in a population that's somewhat different at Citi? Or is there an opportunity to differentiate? So one of the things we've seen in particular around military veterans has been a fabulous growth of employee resource groups focused on military veterans. Open to all employees but there are individuals who become part of it. They themselves might be members of former military servicemen and women. They might be individuals who have children deployed. They might be individuals who had military service members in their family or they might be individuals who just want to learn more about the military or get more involved in for example, community efforts. So that's a pretty good departure from where I'd say we were ten years ago where if someone had said, "What are you doing in the US around military veterans?" We would have had a focus on recruitment, in particular around ensuring just sort of that regulatory purview and what are we doing to support military veterans. We would not have had all those other nuances around the work that we're doing. So I think that sort of illustrates how inclusion has become much more focused on not only what we're doing across the common community, but also what are the things we can do to support these characteristics that are increasingly changing as we go through the years. >> Some of the awards that the process of going through an award that exist there in the market, is important because it gives you an idea of what other companies are doing, as well at some of what the media and the external customer is expecting of our organization. So. It is the process of going through the award that for me, it's the learning for the organization. Looking at what other companies are doing from an employee resource group, can we be looking at that and learning from that. What are they doing from a communication perspective from their leaders? So the process of going through awards are important if you take that as a learning process for your organization versus a check-in-the-box for the organization.

 

Defining Equity

Equity theory refers to people's desire for their inputs — their time, energy, effort, etc. — to be matched equivalently to their outputs; e.g., achievements, growth, validation, acceptance. In terms of diversity and inclusion, equity and equity theory are pivotal because they create a framework for showing how marginalized workers often see lower outputs compared to their peers.

Video Transcript:

Equity theory. So equity theory was first introduced back in 1963 by John Adams. He was a workplace behavioral psychologist; really famous. Equity theory is one of the most well-known theories of motivation. The basic premise is pretty simple. The idea is that people are really attentive to how fair or equitable their outputs are relative to their inputs. The greater people's assessments of equity, the more motivated they are to give it their all at work. However, when people perceive that their inputs-to-outputs ratio is imbalanced — in particular, when they're putting in more than they're getting out — they're motivated to try to achieve balance. Usually, people do this by adjusting their inputs over which they have more control. This often translates into lower motivation to expend effort at work; that is, people tend to withdraw from their work when they feel that things are inequitable. When you think about this input-to-output ratio, you can think about it quite broadly. Inputs include all the things that we bring to our jobs or contribute to a particular task or project; for example, our effort, our energy, expertise, our relevant past experiences, our commitment, positive attitude and a willingness to cooperate with other people. Outputs generally consist of both the formal and informal rewards that matter at work. They include tangible outcomes like pay, job growth, promotions, and job security, as well as less tangible but really important work outcomes like validation and respect, recognition, psychological meaningfulness of the job, and a sense of achievement and fulfillment. Assessments of equity or inequity are based not just on our own assessments of our input-to-output ratio but also on social comparisons; in other words, how our own input-to-output ratio compares to that of others. People compare themselves to others both within their current organization and sometimes also to others outside of their organization. Interestingly, people tend not to notice imbalances that are in their favor. In other words, they're less likely to think it's unfair when they receive greater outputs relative to their inputs when they compare themselves to others.

Many organizations and individuals confuse the terms "equity" and "equality." While these terms are similar, their meanings are different, especially when they are put into action. Equality refers to giving everyone the same opportunities and materials without taking other factors into consideration. Equity refers to giving everyone resources and opportunities based on their circumstances in order for everyone to achieve a fair and equal end result. This means that equity takes into account people's experiences with privilege and oppression and how those factors have influenced their lived experiences and opportunities, including the inputs that they could reasonably be expected to bring to bear. 

Organizations can fall into the trap of encouraging equality over equity. Equality can feel simpler to achieve because it isn't specialized; the result, however, is that providing opportunities and resources through a lens of equality often perpetuates existing inequalities. By committing to scrutinizing existing practices to identify how they may be inequitable for some and making needed changes, your organization can actively improve the experiences and outcomes of individuals with historically marginalized social identities and improve their overall sense of belonging and inclusion.

This same principle also applies to leadership. It is myopic to expect that the same leadership behaviors will have an equivalent impact on experiences of inclusion across individuals, regardless of their social identities. Using an equality-based or "neutral" approach, a leader might invite employees to contribute by saying, "I encourage everyone to speak up." Yet this fails to recognize that some employees experience greater barriers to psychological safety due to their marginalized identities — for example, the threat of being more heavily scrutinized or having their competence doubted, or feeling chronically unseen and unappreciated at work — that make it riskier for them to voice their perspectives freely. An inclusive leader facilitates equitable access to experiences of inclusion by recognizing and dismantling these barriers.

Where Adams's Theory of Equity Falls Short

Adams's theory of equity only tells part of the story about equity and its relationship to bias. Adams's theory does not account for the fact that inputs themselves can be biased — that inputs can contain bias or be impacted by bias. Outputs are also subject to unconscious bias, particularly when those outputs are impacted by human intervention.

Video Transcript:

In its most basic form, Adams's equity theory is a rather simple and elegant theory. However, we now know that it falls short in some important ways. First, it assumes that people's inputs, including their actual contributions or performance, are not themselves biased. It doesn't take into account the fact that there are factors outside of an individual's control that shape their inputs in fundamental ways. Unless we correct for prior sources of inequity, existing disparities tend to be perpetuated. An example would be to use the absolute value of the rigor of the coursework that a student has completed in high school as an indicator of their worthiness to be admitted into a university. But this wouldn't be fair because the types of courses, including the availability of advanced, rigorous coursework, are highly dependent on the wealthiness of the neighborhood in which the school is based and that a student happened to attend. A more equitable input to consider would be to consider the rigor of the coursework that an applicant chose to complete relative to what was available to them. Another example might be to hire recruits out of college based on their prior work experiences or internships, assuming that these experiences reflect a candidate's ability and their motivation unaffected by their circumstances. But it fails to acknowledge that people's past experiences are heavily influenced by factors that are outside of their control; for example, the career networks that might be available to them based on the college that they attended or through their families, or familial obligations that may have precluded them from being able to take really good internships because they were away from home. 

A second way that Adams's equity theory falls short is that it fails to acknowledge that the input-to-output equation is rigged. What do I mean by that? What I mean is that there are factors that act as multipliers of that throughput process between inputs and outputs for some individuals, but other factors act as inhibitors of this process. This is because the way that inputs are perceived by others is shaped by historical and systematic privileges and barriers. For example, we know from research that evidence of competence that's demonstrated by people who are role incongruent — that is, they're different from the prototypical person in a role — their competence tends to be doubted or more heavily scrutinized. While their success tends to be attributed to situational factors like luck or to really great help from other people, their failures tend to be attributed to them. But the opposite is true for people who are role congruent. Attributions of success are made to them as people and failures are attributed to things that may have been outside of their control. What does this mean? This means that the same inputs will be discounted for rule-incongruent individuals compared to role-congruent individuals. That means it will lead to lower outputs for them. Again, it's when these factors are outside of the actor's control that inequities are exacerbated.

Whereas both privileged and marginalized individuals can be the target of individual and personal sources of discrimination, the same is not true of institutional and structural sources of discrimination.

Discrimination at the structural and institutional levels can be either intentional or assumed to be neutral, just like at the individual level. Intentional structural discrimination is when policies that are created and implemented by the dominant group are designed to have a harmful or disempowering impact on minoritized groups. An example is when the intentional reduction of governmental oversight of voting districts makes it possible for states to purge the names of some registered voters in an attempt to bias election outcomes.

There are also institutional policies that may be assumed to be neutral but that have a differential impact on groups due to pre-existing structural inequalities. An example is when organizations set the salary of new hires based on their prior salary or their "salary expectations," which ends up carrying past wage discrimination forward to future jobs.

Forming Stereotypes

The video "Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes" demonstrated how feelings of belonging and uniqueness influence behavior. This example applies to adult behavior as well.

Video Transcript:

So, what did we see in this video about the Brown eyes, Blue Eyes experiment? What we saw is that in the beginning, the children differed based on whether or not they had brown eyes or blue eyes but there was no social value or significance associated with having blue or brown eyes. People weren't motivated or concerned, or motivated to group people into brown versus blue-eyed groups. It didn't matter to the children whether or not they fit into either category. 

But as soon as the teacher Jane Elliott attached some social value or significance to having either brown eyes or blue eyes, even when this distinction is largely arbitrary in that it's not really associated with differences and competence, the teacher was still able to attach the social value to the categories and as soon as she did, it altered the way that the children interacted with each other. The children became motivated to categorize themselves and others into the groupings, either the higher or their lower status groupings, and they started to see each other not as the people that they were, the friends that they were, but as representatives of these categories, the representatives of the stereotypes that the teacher had established about brown-eyed people versus blue-eyed people. And what we started to see was that strong ingroups versus outgroups formed and it was the us-versus-them effect. Research shows that these stereotypes that we have about different groups tend to form pretty quickly. They tend to be pretty stable even in children. For example, research on gender stereotypes shows that children as young as two, three, and four are already have very clear stereotypes about what girls are like and what boys are like, or what girls should be like and what boys should be like. As early as children can speak, for example, boys tend to talk very aggressive stories, 87 percent of the time. Whereas, girls tell aggressive stories only 17 percent of the time. So, they're acting in ways that are consistent with the stereotypes that they have about how boys versus girls should act and when children age two to four were asked to work together for rewards, boys tended to use physical tactics 50 times more often than girls. Again, reinforcing the power that these stereotypes can have on people's behavior. So, stereotypes are thought of as a type of schema. They're merely a cognitive or knowledge structure in the brain, so you can see here in the graphic. What happens is that every time a particular trait or characteristic is associated with the label, so here you can see the F is meant to denote females and the M is meant to denote males, so, take for example that the label female is associated with the trait emotional or dependent. Every time that somebody sees this association between the label and the trait, it becomes strengthened. And so, different socialization experiences, different exposure to the media, can repetitively reinforce these associations until they basically become so strong and so reinforced that they become automatic. So, what happens is that the moment somebody sees the label female, or sees somebody who would be categorized into that label, female, the traits that are associated with that label automatically become assigned to that person. This is what some people call top-down information processing such that, as soon as we see somebody, we as people tend to have a need to categorize them. And once categorized, we use that label and we apply all the different information that is part of that label to that person regardless of how well the individual actually fits that label. Psychologists link this back actually to a basic human need and animals do this too. It's the basic tendency to have to categorize somebody as friend or foe. So, we take visual cues and we have a need as people to categorize them. So, it's thought to be an almost automatic process that happens in the brain.

How Stereotypes Influence People

Key Points

The labels we attach to people will influence how both we and others see them.

Stereotypes influence what we encode, what we notice, and what we remember.

We end up seeing what we expect to see.

Stereotypes influence what or whom we see. The most prominent physical features that a person has — for example, their sex and their ethnicity or race — trigger the most rapid categorization. And once categorized schema content is applied, that's who we see, regardless of how similar that person actually is to the stereotype. The danger is that it leads us to assume things that we might not actually see and make comments like, "They're all alike." It also prevents us from recognizing the variability that actually exists across people in a particular category because we're assigning all the characteristics or traits of that category to all the individuals who become labeled as belonging to that category.

We tend to notice information that is consistent with our schema, and we tend to disregard or not notice information that is inconsistent with our schema. Unsurprisingly, it's more difficult for us to process information that is not consistent with the schema. What we see in research is that if you provide somebody with a label, a schema, or a stereotype prior to exposing them to somebody, or to some stimuli, it then influences what information they notice.

The labels we attach to people carry power to influence how we perceive them in terms of their competence, their behavior, and their capabilities. Research has been done on trainees labeled "high potential" vs. "average." Trainees who had been given the "high potential" label had much more positive interactions with the team leaders; those labels influenced the ways that leaders perceived and interpreted the trainees' behavior. They saw behavior in the trainees that they thought was consistent with being high potential and the leaders invested more effort in coaching those trainees. In turn, the trainees enjoyed that interaction more. This is the power of labels.

This is the power of self-fulfilling prophecies as well: We end up seeing what we expect to see. And it can end up having a very profound impact on what we see as actual performance in that these self-fulfilling prophecies end up leading to behavior or incidents that confirm our stereotypes. Stereotypes influence what we remember — not just what we encode and what we notice, but what we recall about people. People therefore tend to more easily recall information that is consistent with the schema but we tend to have more difficulty remembering irrelevant information.

People also tend to recall more details about ingroup members and have a harder time remembering things about outgroup members. Research shows it's easier to remember negative things about outgroup members, and it's also easier to remember ways in which these outgroup members are different, rather than similar, to members of the ingroup.

So when you consider the implications of this within an organizational context, you could think about, for example, what an interviewer is able to remember, after speaking to a person who is similar to or different from them, about how well that person might fit the job. Or when someone is doing a performance evaluation, they might be able to recall more positive things about a person who is similar to them and more negative things about a person who is dissimilar to them.

Many scholars argue that these seemingly small biases in perception and recall can end up snowballing over the course of a career so that performance evaluations in one year end up influencing evaluations in another year. Perhaps, over time, these unconscious biases help explain some of the gaps that we see in the representation of women, ethnic minorities, and members of other marginalized groups in senior levels of management.

Reducing Prejudice

Left unchecked, stereotypes or unconscious biases can affect decision making in significant ways, although as Professor Nishii hopes to make clear, that's not necessarily going to be an inevitable outcome. People can actively reject stereotypes, as she discusses here.

Video Transcript:

So talking about the negative effects that stereotypes can have on perception I think can be a little bit depressing. I don't want you to take away from this the idea that if the IAT showed that you have some type of stereotype against some group, it doesn't necessarily mean that you will behave in a prejudiced way against members of that group. Research shows some meta-analyses, studies of studies, show that the relationship or correlation between a particular stereotype and engaging in actual prejudicial members of that group is only 0.27; the highest correlation is a one. So that means that it doesn't necessarily mean that stereotypes lead to prejudice, but they can—they can if the stereotypes are left unchecked. What we know is that difference between prejudiced people and non-prejudiced people is that low-prejudice people engage in controlled processing. This is in contrast to automatic processing. That means that they actively reject stereotypes, the content of these stereotypes and they replace them with more egalitarian thoughts, they replace them with a motivation to try to see what's actually there, how a person actually is instead of allowing their assumptions, the traits that are associated with the stereotyped labels to guide what they see. We have to be aware, however, that if you don't engage in this active controlled processing, then these stereotypes or unconscious biases can affect decision making in significant ways. So, there are a number of ways in which we can motivate people to engage in that controlled processing instead of the automatic processing. Some people also refer to this controlled processing, as bottom-up processing. So you're actually collecting personalized individuating information about a person based on what you see, and you're using that to formulate a more accurate image or understanding of the person. 

And so there are two categories of factors, let's call them, that can influence whether or not somebody engages in that controlled processing. So we've got these external motivators. So external motivators are when you can motivate somebody to avoid prejudice because they feel some sort of obligation to be that way, or because they want to avoid embarrassment or punishment or any sort of other negative consequences. So, we can do this in organizations by holding people accountable for the personnel decisions that they make, reward more positive behavior or penalize negative behavior, so this is really more of a compliance focus. We can also have personnel decisions made by a panel so rather than have a single individual rate somebody in an interview or a training context for example, you have more than one person do it, and so then all the raters are aware that there are also other people rating performance and they're motivated to try to be accurate so they don't look too off base. Also when people know that they will receive receive some feedback on the way that they are evaluating somebody, they tend to try to be more careful because they don't want to receive bad feedback. As you can see, these are all examples of trying to behave—behaving in a certain way because you're trying to control how people will react to the way that you're behaving or to the way that you are evaluating other people. There are also internal motivations for engaging in that controlled processing. So, somebody that is internally motivated wants to be non-prejudiced because it's important in and of itself for them to be that way. So when somebody values that non-prejudicial behavior, for example they value being open minded or they value learning about other people, then they tend to slow down and collect that individuating information that allows them to form a more accurate understanding of the other person. So, we see this happening more when people's outcomes are dependent on somebody else. If what you value, what's important to you, is dependent on somebody else, then having an accurate understanding of that other person becomes much more important. You need to be able to predict the way that they are going to be. You need to be able to coordinate with them better and this produces this motivation for people to slow down, check themselves and make sure that they understand the other person better. When people recognize the costs associated with bias and exclusion, they can also be internally motivated. It could be that they themselves have experienced some form of bias or prejudice and therefore are motivated not to produce that same reaction and other people. Perhaps they've seen other people suffer from bias and inclusion, and therefore don't want to perpetuate it, or it could be also that they have experienced some form of negative or inefficient group dynamics as a result of prejudice and so they realize that that hurts everybody and then become motivated to try to stop that process. Also, when people share stories with each other, when they reveal things about themselves often, also when people make themselves vulnerable to other people, we tend to see that this elicits a good reaction in that it tends to promote liking and trust. And when people reveal more about themselves, then they tend to become more motivated to see that person as the person has revealed themselves and to behave in a way that's fair for that person. And so they tend to start to disregard the stereotype and utilize instead that information that has been shared with them by that person.