My suspicion is that much of the brand-name, officially sanctioned Diversity is the very opposite. DEI Diversity is a construct, largely created in academia, supported by corporates, government and consultants. It embraces a particular type of diversity.
It stands to reason that this stifles real diversity. If everyone in a club broadly agrees on X, we’d assume the group outside of this one has more diverse thoughts.
Which speaks to the chief flaw in Diversity. It emphasises measurable diversity. The more important facets of diverse - chiefly thought - are less obvious and more nuanced.
This paper from 2023 in the British Journal of Social Psychology affirms my suspicion. It finds that the political wing more strongly associated with promoting Diversity, “the cluster reflecting the Democrat belief-system”, exhibits less diverse belief systems than the right, “the cluster reflecting the Republican belief-system”.
In their words, “the cluster reflecting the Republican belief-system contained a wider range of attitude responses ranging from mild disagreement to maximum agreement.”
This flies in the face of my understanding of popular wisdom. The mainstream narratiive is that it is the left/liberal/progressive wing that embraces diversity. And the right/conservative wing that doesn’t much care for it or even actively opposes it.
It is worth putting this in plain language. A committee deciding on the races and sexes to include on the cover of your brochure is Diversity, not diversity.
I highlight one caveat. I don’t know that left/right and Democrat/Republican are sensible ways to view the world these days. I certainly don’t identify with either side.
Nonetheless, this work is a good reminder not to take political claims or conventional wisdom at face value.
Read the full study online: Attitude networks as intergroup realities: Using network-modelling to research attitude-identity relationships in polarized political contexts