Diversity can be measured on a host of dimensions—ethnicity, gender, skills, and so on. A group may be diverse on one or more dimensions and homogeneous on others. But people are really bad at recognizing this subtlety. If a group is diverse in any way, a flaw in our cognitive processing can lead us to perceive it as diverse in every way—a distortion that might help explain why inclusion remains so challenging for many companies.
That’s the conclusion of Stanford University researchers who conducted several experiments to assess people’s perceptions of diversity. In one, participants looked at several groups of faces; all the groups were two-thirds male, and some were racially diverse. When asked about the level of gender diversity, subjects were more likely to report groups with racial diversity as…
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Harvard Business Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2016