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Comment by scott_w | Hacker News Reader

Does racial/gender diversity really make your business better? Actively preventing diversity can clearly be negative e.g. refusing to hire women, but blindly promoting diversity for the sake of it can be just as bad.

I would be interested in seeing the questionnaire. The article frames the question in a way that could easily mean "Should companies have a diverse range of skills in their workforce?" which most people would answer positively to. Asking whether they should try to hire people with diverse skill sets could elicit more divided responses.

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What's interesting to me is that there are clearly a lot of Asians who study engineering/comp-sci at excellent North American schools (let alone schools around the world), yet very few represent CTOs/CEOs/execs of tech startups/companies on this continent. Tony Hsieh and Jerry Yang are literally the only guys I can think of in the U.S., while Google does have a number of Indians on their leadership committee.

Indeed. From the linked PDF, the numbers seem to have been percentage of startup men who 'agreed' with the specific statements:

"Diverse teams are better at problem-solving and innovation." (60%)

"I am in favor of a company-wide hiring practice to increase diversity." (41%)

In common workplace parlance, the words 'diverse' and 'diversity' in those two statements aren't necessarily referring to the same qualitative goal. "Diverse teams" can be taken to mean "diverse in the relevant dimensions for problem-solving and innovation", such as having a variety of skills, temperaments, organizational-responsibilities, or life experiences. Meanwhile, "hiring practice to increase diversity" often means a focus on certain broad categories (of race, gender, age) during hiring.

Such an interpretation does not create the 'striking' logical tension Klein ascribes to the data, as would exist if these two phrases were as closely related as Klein's analogy to "knowing how to code" and "hiring people who know how to code".

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