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I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good. One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble. It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language. |