The Evidence
Working on the subject of diversity and inclusion in engineering, I am always being asked for the evidence and the business case for why diverse teams are better. On this page I will try to compile this evidence, as I come across it.
how and where diversity drives financial performance, harvard business review 2018
Diversity is both an issue of fairness and, some say, a driver of innovation and performance. To assess the latter claim, we undertook a large, cross-country study into the relationship between multiple aspects of managerial diversity, the presence of enabling conditions such as leadership support for diversity, and innovation outcomes. Read more here.
Why diverse teams are smarter, Harvard business review
Striving to increase workplace diversity is not an empty slogan — it is a good business decision. A 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean, and those in the top quartile for gender diversity were 15% more likely to have returns above the industry mean. Read the rest of the article here.
Gender diversity and corporate performance, Credit suisse
Larg-cap companies with at least one woman on the board have outperformed their peer group with no women on the board by 26% over the last six years, according to a report by Credit Suisse Research Institute. Read more
why diversity matters, mckinsey
We know intuitively that diversity matters. It’s also increasingly clear that it makes sense in purely business terms. Our latest research finds that companies in the top quartile for gender or racial and ethnic diversity are more likely to have financial returns above their national industry medians. Companies in the bottom quartile in these dimensions are statistically less likely to achieve above-average returns. And diversity is probably a competitive differentiator that shifts market share toward more diverse companies over time.
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