[gracenotes]

Maybe? The type of diversity that companies care about (to contrast with the many strawmen out there) happens to be good for the bottom line. That is, a team with 5 men and 5 women is likelier to perform better than one with 10 men [1]. Some explanations I have heard are that diversity brings perspective that wouldn't be present in a monoculture, and that it improves psychological safety which is a huge determiner of team performance [2]. There are models out there made by actual social scientists of why diversity helps. See [3] for instance, has both elements.

It does seem like age-based discrimination would have a negative effect on psychological safety, as with any discrimination due to conscious or unconscious biases. Regarding perspective, an experienced individual could either bring in valuable insight from their experience or constantly veer towards the status quo, partly depending on how you want to look at it.

I think the answer is: it is complicated. You now have my ideas on why diversity is valuable. Does age fit that model? (Even if not, of course, age-based discrimination is not good.)

[1] https://news.mit.edu/2014/workplace-diversity-can-help-botto... [2] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learn... [3] https://hbr.org/2013/12/how-diversity-can-drive-innovation [4] https://www.fastcompany.com/1841060/redefining-diversity-new... - bonus

[throw_away_777]

The sources you linked are rather weak evidence for your claims. This type of observational research is difficult, and in the social sciences, especially about political topics, you should be very skeptical. The majority of published papers in this field are wrong. Diversity may or may not be good for companies bottom lines, but there is no conclusive evidence (at least from what you linked) - and it also matters the magnitude of the effect.

Some of these articles are implying a size of an effect that is completely ridiculous, there is just no way that diversity "could increase revenue by 41%" - we'd see way more diversity in work places if this was true. Here is an article with a different conclusion - and here the "educational diversity" only had a more reasonable 2% effect, while "demographic diversity" is allegedly harmful [1]. But you have to be careful, all of these studies appear to suffer from testing multiple hypothesis - breaking diversity down into sub-categories and looking at each one independently should decrease confidence in the conclusions of these studies.

[1] http://ftp.iza.org/dp6973.pdf

[gracenotes]

It's better to try to understand what's happening than handwave and say "it's all bunk". That is way more political of an action than trying to determine causality through data. The social sciences are valuable in that they're trying to figure things out about the world which are critical to making good policy, rather than winging it and accidentally or intentionally screwing over people who are different than you.

> Some of these articles are implying a size of an effect that is completely ridiculous, there is just no way that diversity "could increase revenue by 41%" - we'd see way more diversity in work places if this was true.

This seems to be rejecting data and substituting and a handwave. From the original study, 41% is the actual coefficient, controlling for a ton of things. Likely there are latent factors that make workplaces both gender-diverse and performant, so just swapping out half of a workplace would not hit all of these, which the paper acknowledges. We are seeing more diversity thanks to studies like these and explicit diversity initiatives, but given all of the biases that can exist in hiring pipelines, I can't think of any reason why it would happen naturally.

The paper you link is trying to measure firm productivity (could not 100% figure out what this means) based on data from Denmark, mainly non-white-collar jobs. It notes that demographic diversity promotes "better problem-solving abilities and more creativity and knowledge spillover" and can be a "substantial competitive advantage", limited by people not trusting/communicating with each other (i.e. integrating effectively).