Diversity initiatives in the US workplace: A brief history, their intended and unintended consequences

Abstract

Diversity initiatives are designed to help workers from disadvantaged backgrounds achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes in organizations. However, these programs are often ineffective. To better understand less‐than‐desired outcomes and the shifting diversity landscape, we synthesize literature on how corporate affirmative action programs became diversity initiatives and current literature on their effectiveness. We focus specifically on work dealing with mechanisms that make diversity initiatives effective as well as their unintended consequences. When taken together, these literature point to several inequality‐specific omissions in contemporary discussions of organizational diversity initiatives, such as the omission of racial inequality. As we contend in the first section of this review, without affirmative action law, which initially tasked US employers with ending racial discrimination at the workplace, we would not have diversity initiatives. We conclude by providing directions for future research and elaborating on several core foci that scholars might pursue to better (re)connect issues of organizational diversity with the aims of equity, equality and social justice.

Measuring DEI within workplaces: questioning the theoretical, empirical, and practical models

“…Understanding which DEI initiatives are easier to achieve would help in setting DEI goals as well as scaffolding the work so folks could see the progress that is occurring. A summary of diversity initiatives that are effective versus ineffective are found in Portocarrero and Carter (2022). The diversity management field could take these a step further and create an outline for which ones are easier and more difficult to do as this would help organizations to decide upon their entry point for this work.…”

A Learning Assessment to Increase Diversity in Academic Health Sciences

“…[10][11][12] Some higher education and health care settings have engaged policies, programs, and practices to address racism, exclusion, and discrimination. Previous literature identifies efforts to increase workplace 13 and medical school student diversity, 14 and scholars have explored the organizational processes underlying institutional efforts. [15][16][17] However, published academic literature lacks a compiled evidence base for well-designed, context-appropriate, and antiracist strategies.…”

The Diversity and Inclusion Report: The Rise of a New Corporate Public Reporting Genre

“…The concept of diversity in an organizational setting has often been used to describe the demographic differences within its workforce composition (McGrath et al, 1995), or "the mixture of attributes within a workforce that in significant ways affect how people think, feel, and behave at work, and their acceptance, work performance, satisfaction, or progress in the organization" (Thomas & Bendick, 2013). Diversity initiatives are generally defined as policies, programs, activities, and other efforts implemented by organizations to achieve equitable opportunities and outcomes for disadvantaged groups within organizations and society (Portocarrero & Carter, 2022; "Society for Human Resource Management," 2011). Such initiatives offer many benefits to both companies and employees, and workplace diversity in the United States has come a long way through continuous changes and adaptions.…”