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My prior would be, McKinsey will meticulously hand-select companies to design studies that will flatter elite opinion. Staying on the right side of the right people is how those lucrative public contracts keep flowing in.
I've never heard any mechanism proposed either. Do you know if they controlled for company size? Would be funny if they were just measuring returns to scale, with big companies having more diverse employees due to having more resources to devote to DEI.
I don’t think you actually have to hand select companies very hard, because there’s lots of infra-oriented companies with low margins because they have to maintain lots of infrastructure and workforces that are as white and male as you’d expect blue collar infrastructure workforces to be. Just stuff the ‘low diversity’ group with those and let companies with more normal profit margins and representations contrast, then don’t double check how far the best fit line extends.
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Yet there can be costs to diversity (eg communication issues, cultural differences causing strife). I do believe in balance the sign is likely positive but almost certainly dwarfed by competence (ie a competent workforce trumps a diverse one).
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Is it not usually something along the lines of "Different backgrounds = different perspectives + more domain information"?
I watched a documentary on the Yorkshire Ripper the other day, and (the show alleged) that the retrospective enquiry into "Why did it take so long to catch him" concluded that, because the task force was composed near-exclusively of set-in-their-ways Old Boys 1970s Norf FC supporters, they for years stuck to the theory that any working-class woman out unchaperoned at night was a prostitute, therefore the Ripper was targeting prostitutes, and that made them incorrectly focus their inquiries in that direction. Whereas if they'd had a few women in senior police roles maybe they could have said "Hey wait a minute, a women out at night isn't automatically a whore".
How this lesson against groupthink applies to other industries I'm not sure, but if you're marketing consumer goods then it might be profitable if you have a gay or a black to ask them what's the "in" colours amongst the minority community this season, or something, idk.
Similarly, two Milwaukee cops managed to be convinced by Jeffrey Dahmer that a naked14-yr-old Laotian kid was actually his 19-yr-old boyfriend. Given well-established issues re cross-racial eyewitness identification and the like, it seems possible that an Asian cop, or perhaps even a non-Asian cop who had seen photos of the kids of Asian colleagues, might have been less likely to have been fooled.
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Thank you for reminding me of this classic meme, gonna do a little binge.
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