Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.
Revenue for the division I work in at my current employer exploded when we started hiring people outside of the traditional avenue for new hires. Until a couple of years ago we had been staffed by traditional government/military-focused scientists and engineers with narrowly-focused aerospace engineering backgrounds. Our customer base was 100% domestic government/military because that's who we knew and had relationships with. Outside consultants recommended non-"traditional" hires, and we followed their recommendations.
New hires in the environmental sciences (mainly women) and personnel with foreign language experience opened up market opportunities that we had been unable to see before and by diversifying our workforce we were able to diversify our customer base to include foreign environmental management organizations, agricultural, and natural resource-based markets.
My employer develops and sells a pretty unique Synthetic Aperture Radar system with capabilities not found in competing platforms. We had been trickling out systems to the Navy and Air Force on a onesy-twosy basis every year.
People with a diverse background said "hey we can sell this to oil and gas companies, departments of agriculture and environmental science all over the world, and we can work with all of these universities on terrestrial surveying projects and make more money".
And we did.
I imagine for mass-market consumer products and services the impact of understanding the needs of the market by having a workforce representative of the market as a whole would be even greater than what we experienced.
> Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
So when society changes the demographics we have to fire and hire the right amount? Sorry you're the best candidate we've ever interviewed but we have hired too many black men and are above our diversity quota.
> Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.
Is it the diversity of color or diversity of thought that is what drives a better bottom line? I'm gonna go on a hunch it's the diversity of thought that you're taking credit for.
Imbalance is bad because participation in civil society, to include employment, should be representative of society as a whole.
But why?
I understand the point that diverse workforce leads to diverse ideas. But will fifty women per hundred employees produce five times more diverse ideas than, say, ten women?
Hiring women just for the sake of hiring women looks like a cargo cult.
I agree that "increase diversity" is a rather obtuse meta argument, and using it implicitly argues that there are not other significant discrimination issues facing these groups. Maybe it is a better argument to make in certain settings though. For example, a company wouldn't want to admit to having discriminatory biases in hiring, so "increase diversity" is a much more palatable objective.
The more honest, less PR answer is that people still discriminate on huge range of factors. Race and Gender are just the most obvious and egregious.
The post you're replying to specifically claims that it is to make employment more representative of the whole of society. Your statement that it's "hiring women just for the sake of hiring women" completely ignores the very words you're quoting.
Besides, inclusive and diverse workforces have been repeatedly shown to be better for the bottom line because organizations are more able to serve a wider market when they are made up people more representative of the total market.
Revenue for the division I work in at my current employer exploded when we started hiring people outside of the traditional avenue for new hires. Until a couple of years ago we had been staffed by traditional government/military-focused scientists and engineers with narrowly-focused aerospace engineering backgrounds. Our customer base was 100% domestic government/military because that's who we knew and had relationships with. Outside consultants recommended non-"traditional" hires, and we followed their recommendations.
New hires in the environmental sciences (mainly women) and personnel with foreign language experience opened up market opportunities that we had been unable to see before and by diversifying our workforce we were able to diversify our customer base to include foreign environmental management organizations, agricultural, and natural resource-based markets.
My employer develops and sells a pretty unique Synthetic Aperture Radar system with capabilities not found in competing platforms. We had been trickling out systems to the Navy and Air Force on a onesy-twosy basis every year.
People with a diverse background said "hey we can sell this to oil and gas companies, departments of agriculture and environmental science all over the world, and we can work with all of these universities on terrestrial surveying projects and make more money".
And we did.
I imagine for mass-market consumer products and services the impact of understanding the needs of the market by having a workforce representative of the market as a whole would be even greater than what we experienced.