Just that groups of different people with different thinking styles are able to come up with solutions to problems faster than a team of people who think alike or are beaten into group think by a strong central authority.
It really follows the pattern of biological diversity in ecosystems: a diverse ecosystem is able to thrive and overcome troubles more than a non-diverse one, which is actually quite fragile.
But a 'diverse' team is code for a team with both black and white people, men and women, straight and gay, etc.
So when you say that 'groups of different people with different thinking styles' you are implying that, for example, black people think differently from white people for the sole reason that they are black and other people are white. Or in other words, that if you get a random black person off the street you can assume his views will be different from a white person's?
Isn't that kind of grouping and assumption exactly what we don't want to promote? I can't reconcile this in my mind.
Anonymous because I don't want to be shamed as a racist when I'm not, but a genuine question.
>> you are implying that, for example, black people think differently from white people for the sole reason that they are black and other people are white.
Not at all. Instead, different people coming from different backgrounds tend to have different life experiences and perspectives, which influence how they approach the world and how they solve problems. It's not inherent to their race or gender, but merely a fact of having lived different lives.
If you get a bunch of people from different backgrounds and cultures then you'll have a better pool to draw new ideas and creative thinking from. Much better than a room full of ~22yo middle-class white guys.
The idea isn't that you make a pokemon team of people of all skin colors, sexualities and genders to have all damage types covered. It's more that cultural background and experiences made shape thinking, problem-solving approaches, etc, and if your team is 100% straight white affluent men, chances are pretty good they will all have roughly overlapping backgrounds and leave the vast majority of the human experience uncovered.
I don't get it - either it's right to look at the color of someone's skin and make an assumption about their background, or it isn't.
You could hire both a rich white guy and a poor black guy, in order to get diversity, and then find out they both love classical music, basketball, knitting, went to the same college and vote for the same political party.
If you're telling me you can look at the color of someone's skin and tell me what their cultural beliefs and background is then you're the crazy racist judgemental one!
I'd say you'd have better luck predicting the weather with a dartboard. But knowing a person's skin color or cultural heritage or gender etc would let you make better predictions, that's a fact.
For building diverse teams I think selecting people based on their skin color would be pretty dumb. Rather pay attention to their background. But you should be putting their skills first in either case.
I said nothing about gender and ethnicity. Diversity is a concept that goes beyond that. You can be a white straight male and still be a weirdo, or a black Hispanic lesbian and still be a conformist.
Right, but people say things like 'all the speakers at this conference are white men - that's not diverse enough'.
If you are determining diversity by sex and skin color, I'm saying that you are making judgements about people's background, tastes, culture, etc that are racist and sexist.
You could also say all the speakers at this conference are too young, too old, too corporate, too hipster, too southern, too Yankee, ....
You can't really create diversity directly (people feel comfortable around those like themselves), instead it happens organically because people turn out to be naturally different, BUT you can definitely act against it through bias based on gender, ethnicity, age, looks...
The goal is to let diversity thrive through environments and hiring practices that are free of unnecessary bias, but old habits take a long time to break.
But natural ecosystems have a very stringent natural selection operating, so you always end up with diversity that represents an objective improvement, something that isn't guaranteed when diversity is driven by a company's philosophical notion of justice.
It really follows the pattern of biological diversity in ecosystems: a diverse ecosystem is able to thrive and overcome troubles more than a non-diverse one, which is actually quite fragile.