1. No category

Managing for Diversity &
Issues in Recruitment
Dr. Luisa Amelia Dempere
2012-2014 Past-Chair
President’s Council on Diversity
Academic Administrators Leadership Seminars:
New Administrators Orientation
Wednesday, November 19, 2014
AGENDA
• Historical Perspective on Diversity
• Issues in Recruiting
• Managing for Diversity
• President’s Council on Diversity
Defining Diversity
The full spectrum of human differences and similarities,
including immutable and mutable characteristics yielding unique
perspectives.
Other way to “see” it...
Society for Human Resource Management
Historical Perspective
2014
>>2005
1985
1980
1975
1965
1960
<<<1960
1990
Issues in Recruiting
Title VII of the
Civil Rights Act
of 1964
Executive Order
11246
Age Discrimination
in Employment Act
of 1967
Title IX of the
Education
Amendments of
1972
Americans with
Disabilities Act
of 1990
Equal Pay Act
of 1963
LAWS
~
COMPLIANCE
Vocational
Rehabilitation
Act of 1973
Fair Labor
Standards Act
of 1938
Genetic
Information
Nondiscrimination
Act of 2008
Pregnancy
Discrimination
Act of 1978
Immigration
Reform &
Control Act of
1986
Uniformed
Services
Employment &
Reemployment
Rights Act of 1994
Equal Employment
Opportunity
The enforcement of
statutes to prevent
employment
discrimination
Affirmative Action
The effort to achieve
parity in the workforce
through outreach and
eliminating barriers in
hiring
IT’S THE LAW!
 It is illegal to discriminate against an applicant or employee
because of that person’s race, color, religion, sex, national origin,
age, disability or genetic information.
 It is also illegal:

To publish job advertisements that show a preference for
or discourages someone from applying for a job based on
the above-referenced reasons.

To make decisions about job assignments and promotions
based on the above-referenced reasons.

To discriminate against an employee in the payment of
wages or employee benefits on the above-referenced
reasons.
SYSTEMIC
DISCRIMINATION
 Involves a pattern or practice, policy, or class case where the alleged
discrimination has a broad impact on an industry, profession or employer.
Examples of systemic discrimination:


Discriminatory barriers in recruitment or hiring.
Discriminatory restricted access to management trainee
programs and to high level jobs.

Exclusion of qualified women from traditionally male dominated
fields of work.

Disability discrimination such as unlawful pre-employment
inquiries.

Age discrimination in reductions in force and retirement
benefits.
Faculty Diversity
1990
1985
1980
1975
1965
1960
<<<1960
Faculty Diversity
An article published in The Academy of
Management Journal examined the impact of
group diversity on academic performance.
For the study, the researchers defined
diversity by cultural identification.
They created 19 culturally diverse groups
and 17 culturally homogenous groups
composed of white-Americans
(Cultural Diversity's Impact On Interaction Process and Performance: Comparing
Homogeneous and Diverse Task Groups)
At the end the diverse teams had
surpassed the homogenous groups in
overall performance. In fact, the
diverse groups far exceeded the
homogenous groups in the
“Alternatives generated” (read:
innovation) score.
Page, Scott E. (2008-08-11). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies . Princeton University Press.
Kindle Edition.
“Diverse groups of problem solvers — groups of
people with diverse tools— consistently outperformed
groups of the best and the brightest.
If I formed two groups, one random (and therefore
diverse ) and one consisting of the best individual
performers, the first group almost always did better.
In my model, diversity
trumped ability.”
Cognitive functioning is a term referring to
a human’s ability to process thoughts.
Cognition mainly refers to things like
memory, the ability to learn new
information, speech, understanding of
written material.
Page, Scott E. (2008-08-11). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies . Princeton
University Press. Kindle Edition.
Identity diversity and cognitive diversity often go hand in hand.
Two people belonging to different identity groups, or with
different life experiences, also tend to acquire diverse cognitive
tools.
Cognitive vs identity diversity
Cognitive diversity doesn’t improve performance when it comes to
routine tasks, like flipping burgers. Routine tasks are better done
by individuals.
In dealing with complex tasks like engineering problems, or tasks
requiring creativity and innovation, or managerial issues,
cognitive diversity is a key explanatory variable in levels of
performance.
Page, Scott E. (2008-08-11). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (p. 7). Princeton
University Press. Kindle Edition.
Cognitive diversity has four dimensions:
Diverse perspectives: people have different ways of
representing situations and problems.
Diverse interpretations: people put things into different
categories and classifications.
Diverse heuristics: People have different ways of
generating solutions to problems.
Diverse predictive models: Some people analyze the
situation. Others may look for the story...
Page, Scott E. (2008-08-11). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (p. 46). Princeton University
Press. Kindle Edition.
Diverse Perspectives:
Perspectives are ways of seeing the problem.
They create different landscapes.
The best perspectives create
landscapes with a single
peak— they organize the
information in such a way
that a single, obvious
solution becomes clear.
When people see a problem from the same
perspective, they are likely to get stuck on the
same local peaks.
Diverse interpretations: people put things into different
categories and classifications.
Watching shapes in the clouds...
Diverse heuristics: People have different ways of
generating solutions to problems.
Some people like to talk through their thinking about
problems; others prefer to write out his solutions first
and then talk.
 The more productively a perspective organizes reality,
the more heuristics people can create to work in that
perspective.
 Innovations can arise from rearranging the box with a
new perspective or from exploring parts of the box that
have been ignored with new heuristics.
 Diverse perspectives are more likely
to lead to breakthroughs;
diverse heuristics are more likely
to lead to iterative improvements.
Why is diversity vital for innovation?
Comparing the solving of problems with climbing rugged landscapes.
People with different perspectives might enable a group of diverse people to do
better than a group of like-minded experts who think they know they are on
climbing the highest mountain.
Mount Everest
Multiple Perspectives and Heuristics
are Essential
We Now Work in Teams
…which shows the advantage of working
in teams…
Making a Difference:
Scott Page, from Academy of Management Perspectives, Nov. 2007, page 11
This does not imply the irrelevance of ability.
Ability still matters, but so does diversity.
And, once an ability threshold has been met,
diversity matters more than ability.
Galton’s
Steer
At the 1906
West of England
Fat Stock and Poultry Exhibition, 787 people guessed the weight
of a steer.
Francis Galton collected the data and found the average guess was
1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the steer was 1,198 pounds.
Wisdom of the Crowd
Information Aggregation
On Who Wants to be a Millionaire,
the lifeline is correct 2/3 of the
time.
The audience is correct:
9/10 times!
Goldcorp Challenge
In 1999 CEO Rob McEwen instructed his geologists to release all geological records to
the public. The “Goldcorp Challenge” offered $575k to anyone who could find the gold
and drew 1,200 people from 50 countries.
Results:
 110 sites identified 50% new,
80% produced gold.
 8 million ounces found.
 Company value up from $100 million to $9 billion!
“… if a loved one requires open-heart surgery, we do
not want a collection of butchers, bakers and
candlestick makers carving open the chest cavity. We’d
much prefer a trained heart surgeon, and for good
reason.”
Scott E. Page
MYTHS ABOUT HIRING A DIVERSE FACULTY
 Relatively few qualified women or minority candidates are
available, and these are highly sought-after, so we are unlikely to recruit
them.

Data (Ford Foundation) suggest that minorities are not sought-after:
 Minority Postdocs: 54% never approached by any institution.
 We only use quality as a criterion for hiring… adding diversity will
therefore compromise quality.


Hiring a more diverse faculty will improve quality, not compromise it.
More heterogeneous groups have greater creativity, bring wider
range of viewpoints to an academic endeavor.
 We are doing everything we can, so the situation is already the best
it can be. The problem is all due to older long-term faculty, so once they
die/retire, things will automatically improve.
NON-COMPLIANCE
LIABILITIES
 Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP)

Authority to cancel, terminate or suspend federal contracts and
awards in whole or in part for failure of the contractor or
subcontractor to comply with the nondiscrimination provisions of the
contract.

Authority to declare UF ineligible for further federal contracts
or extensions or other modifications of existing contracts.
 U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)

Authority to award compensatory and punitive damages to a
complainant (depending on the size of the employer (over 500
employees – limit is $300,000).
BUSINESS CASE
FACULTY DIVERSITY
 An effective faculty diversity program fosters an academic
community that reflects a diverse range of interests, abilities, life
experiences and worldviews that enhance the academic mission of
the University of Florida.
 An effective faculty diversity program supports the equality of
opportunity which ensures that the University of Florida can fully
utilize the intellectual resources embedded in our diversity and
maintain our legitimacy as a public university receiving federal
funds.
BUSINESS CASE
FACULTY DIVERSITY
• A diverse faculty reduces the probability of ‘groupthinking’
where pressure to conform within a group can prevent good
decision making as independent thinking is lost.
• A diverse faculty creates a greater engagement of a full range of
differences in producing the synergies that leads to
breakthroughs in productivity and innovations.
• A diverse faculty provides a broader pool of skills, talents and
perspectives to draw from for problem-solving and
organizational success.
Managing Diversity
Diversity Retention = Inclusion!
Inclusion
Diversity
Law
Diversity without inclusion, will not work.
Potentially limiting concepts and strategies...
“Benchmarking” --- Not having to re-invent the wheel...
“A good fit”--- Fit what?
“Participation” --- Not necessarily inclusion
Problems of Diversity
Getting the benefits of diversity depends people being able to work
together. We would expect that some people who are diverse in
identity terms find it difficult to work together effectively.
Communication
(Problem solvers with diverse perspectives may have difficulty
understanding each other)
Misunderstanding and Mistrust
Less comfortable atmosphere
(We are all more comfortable with like-minded individuals)
Page, Scott E. (2008-08-11). The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (p. 15).
Princeton University Press. Kindle Edition.
If well managed, identity diversity can create
benefits, provided it correlates with cognitive
differences and provided the task is one in which
diversity matters.
If people do not believe in the value of diversity, then when part of a
diverse team, they are not as likely to produce good outcomes
Wisdom of the Crowd
Information Aggregation
Many corporations such as Apple, Toshiba, Texas Instruments, Philips,
BASF, GlaxoSmithKline, Procter & Gamble, the BBC and Nokia have
embraced open innovation, realizing the benefits of harnessing
inventiveness from outside their corporate walls.
Final Thoughts from Scott Page
 Our individual abilities are not likely to growth much
anytime soon.
 Our collective diversity can grow.
 Diversity is our best hope to solve problems and to
create innovations.
UF PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON DIVERSITY
DR. SHARI ROBINSON
CHAIR PRESIDENT’S COUNCIL ON DIVERSITY
2014-2015
UF President’s Council on Diversity
 Two-year membership term
 Faculty, staff, administration, students, community
members
 Monthly Meetings
 Diversity Action Plan – developed by Council and
reviewed by vice presidents, college deans, directors,
and chairs
http://hr.ufl.edu
 Committees
UF Diversity Action Plan Initiatives
1. Clearly define and publicize the University’s
commitment to diversity.
2. Create a welcoming environment for individuals of all
races, genders, nationalities, religions, sexual orientation,
sexual identity & expression, viewpoints, ethnicities, &
for those with disabilities.
3. Recruit and retain more women and individuals from
diverse backgrounds in faculty positions.*
4. Recruit, retain & graduate more of undergraduate and
graduate minority students and women (or men) in
fields where they are not well represented.*
*These targeted outreach and recruitment efforts are undertaken to provide meaningful opportunities for all, including
people from under-served groups, within the context of regular, broad-based outreach and recruitment.
UF Diversity Action Plan Initiatives
(continued)
5. Provide incentives to academic units and academic support
units for developing best practices and models for increasing
diversity.
6. Provide high quality diversity education, orientation, and
training available to all members of the university
community.
7. Collect data and create databases to systematically and
effectively assess progress to achieve diversity goals.
Thank you!
Questions?