Biglaw, Minority Issues

Another Year Has Passed; Are Your Firm’s Diversity Initiatives Helping Or Hurting?

If your firm’s diversity has remained stagnant (or declined), then it is time to reevaluate your firm’s diversity initiatives.

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“These ain’t new problems, they just old ways.” – Pusha T

What does data from diversity programs at 708 companies from 1971 to 2002 reveal? It shows that many diversity programs were ineffective and some diversity efforts even made things worse at these companies.

The report by Harvard Professor Frank Dobbin and his team, Best Practices or Best Guesses?, is well worth reading. As Hackbright instructor Rachel Thomas notes, Dobbin’s report reveals that the most effective diversity programs are “responsibility structures” such as diversity committees, diversity staff positions, and affirmative action plans.

Another year has passed; do you know if your firm’s diversity initiatives, or lack thereof, are helping or hurting diversity and inclusion in your firm?

Another report, Try and Make Me!: Why Corporate Diversity Training Fails, expands Dobbin’s original research of 708 companies to 805 companies. It reveals that although diversity training often consumes the lion’s share of a corporation’s diversity budget, training may do little to change attitudes or behaviors. Just as Dobbin’s original report provided specific, concrete recommendations to improve diversity in an organization, this report also offers specific, concrete steps to increase diversity in an organization.

Harvard Business Review’s Avivah Wittenberg-Cox further outlines three diversity “best practices” that hurt women and how a firm can solve them. One specific solution she lists is for firms to conduct “Strategic Debates” that get Executive Committees (mostly men) to spend a day on three topics: WHY? WHAT? And HOW?

  • WHY? Involves debating whether the company should aim for gender balance, why, how and how fast. It is in peer-group discussions that they begin to align a common understanding of the issue — and the goal.

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  • WHAT? Is a fast-track education on gender differences and how to manage “bilingually” across genders. Remarkably, leaders will be the first to tell you that they really don’t understand women.
  • HOW? Offers guidelines on how to implement gender balance on a global scale, and what to avoid. What are the innovative best practices, how to radically reframe the whole issue as a strategic priority for all managers, and how to pace and sequence a program over a realistic timeline.

If a firm wants to look more like a meritocracy and less like a mirrortocracy, then it will have to take a real hard look at its numbers and data set. In other words, a firm will need to examine its past diversity and inclusion initiatives, current situation, and recruiting pipeline to get an accurate reflection of its culture. It is important to remember that if a firm’s culture isn’t consistent with its recruiting initiatives, it will continue to suffer from the leaky pipeline to partnership problem.

In 2015, diversity and inclusion in the legal industry, as well as other industries, have become quite the buzzwords. In 2016, can diversity and inclusion initiatives have a real, significant impact on the data in our profession? Or will these initiatives continue to give only an illusion of corporate fairness?

We will not solve the diversity crisis in the legal profession by using the same thinking that has created this crisis. Another year has passed. If your firm’s diversity has remained stagnant (or declined), then it is time to reevaluate your firm’s diversity initiatives.

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Renwei Chung is a 2L at Southern Methodist University School of Law. He has an undergraduate degree from Michigan State University and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Golden Rule: How Income Inequality Will Ruin America (affiliate link). He has been randomly blogging about anything and everything at Live Your Truth since 2008. He was born in California, raised in Michigan, and lives in Texas. He has a yellow lab named Izza and enjoys old-school hip hop, the NBA and stand up paddleboarding (SUP). He is really interested in startups, entrepreneurship, and innovative technologies. You can contact Renwei by email at projectrenwei@gmail.com, follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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