diversity

Conformity

This is the week of the 2025 world figure skating championships. Since the next Winter Olympics are in 2026, this event is going to be particularly intense, because the placements here will determine how many competitors each country gets to send to the Olympics. I won’t be at Worlds, as much as I love Boston – it would have been an expensive trip, but now the anti-Canadian attitudes of the US government are making a lot of Canadians nervous about crossing the border.

Instead of going to Worlds, I went to a different kind of skating event this weekend. It was a performance by Le Patin Libre. Several members of this Montreal-based “contemporary skating company” are former competitive skaters who became frustrated with (more…)

A Closer Look at Malcolm Gladwell’s “Magic Third”

Twelve years ago, I wrote a post on this blog about the “10,000 hour rule” that Malcolm Gladwell promoted in his book Outliers. Gladwell claimed that 10,000 hours was the “magic number of greatness” – that 10,000 hours of practice was required to excel at an activity.  The author of the study that Gladwell cited as supporting this claim said that Gladwell misinterpreted the study’s results. Others have pointed out that the “10,000 hour rule” is misleading in suggesting that the total time spent on an activity is the only predictor of success. It doesn’t take into account other variables that might affect skill development, such as deliberate practice, innate or acquired talent, the age at which someone begins the activity, and access to appropriate equipment, coaching, and training sites.

While there are debates about exactly how much effect some of these variables have, it’s clear that Gladwell took the 10,000-hour figure out of context, and also skimmed over some important details that are necessary to fully understand how skill development works.

The post I wrote on the “10,000-hour rule” is by far the most popular post ever on this blog. That shows how interested people are in what Gladwell says. It also shows the importance of looking closely at his claims – to see what evidence he cites to support them, and to see whether experts on the subject agree with his interpretations.

This is not to say that only experts can discuss these kinds of topics. Sometimes an outsider can see details or trends that experts don’t notice. And there’s always a place for a writer who’s not a scientist or researcher to explain research and its outcomes to a general audience. But the writer needs to get the details right, and not simplify things to the point where important pieces of information are omitted.

Gladwell has just released a new book, Revenge of the Tipping Point. One of its chapters is about a new “magic number”: the “Magic Third”. This, Gladwell claims, is the number of minority members in a group that’s necessary for the minority to be accepted as part of the group. I’m going to look at this claim in detail because this general subject (organization and group dynamics) falls into my own area of professional expertise, so I have some familiarity with the relevant research.

The chapter subtitle of “The Magic Third” is a quote from one of Gladwell’s interviewees: “I would say, absolutely, there is some tipping point in my experience”. Notice that the quote doesn’t mention the “magic third”, or any number for that matter; it only says that there is a demographic tipping point which causes group dynamics to change. This type of change is well-documented in research on the effects of group composition. The fact that group dynamics change if group membership changes also won’t be a surprise to anyone.

Gladwell starts out by discussing (more…)

The Right To Disconnect

I wrote an article for The Conversation website about “right to disconnect” laws (laws that give workers the right to ignore after-hours communications from employers) and why these are an opportunity for organizations, rather than a constraint. The full article is available here.

Is Organizational Commitment the Reason that Managers Don’t Support Diversity?

Organizational commitment – how strongly a participant feels affiliated with an organization – is a fascinating phenomenon.  Strong organizational commitment can be highly beneficial to the organization and to the participant, because strongly committed participants generally contribute positively and helpfully to the organization. These contributions aren’t just in the form of improved productivity, but also in the form of organizational citizenship that improves the quality of interpersonal relationships within the organization, and the overall experience of being part of the organization.

(I use “participant” rather than “employee” because organizational commitment is important in paid employment and in volunteer work. It can be even more important in volunteer-based organizations, because strong affiliations, and the benefits that volunteers experience from them, can be a reason for volunteers to participate in the organization when there’s no financial reward for doing so.)

However, there’s a downside to organizational commitment. It can be so strong that participants tend to overlook or downplay, or even try to discredit, negative information or events. This isn’t necessarily because of any malicious intent, but because the participant genuinely believes that the information is inaccurate or that it reflects poorly on the organization. Addressing this conundrum is where researchers Daniel To, Elad Sherf, and Maryam Kouchaki have made an extremely valuable contribution to the literature on organizational diversity initiatives – by finding that managers having structural power in organizations may actually reduce their support for diversity initiatives.

When pretty much every organization has a statement or policy about the importance of diversity and the importance of supporting it, it may seem counter-intuitive that managers would resist diversity initiatives. This seems especially counter-intuitive when (more…)

Being Woke about “Woke”

Research is intended to move knowledge forward. One of the ways that happens is by putting ideas forward and collectively discussing them.

A new article in the academic journal Academy of Management Perspectives asks the provocative question: Why Do Companies Go Woke? It’s extremely troubling that research mostly based on broad generalizations and selective interpretations has been published in such a high-profile journal – particularly one with the stated mission of “inform[ing] current and future ‘thought leaders’”.

Before anyone starts screaming “censorship” – the authors of the article, like any researchers, have a right to research whatever they think is worth researching, and to write about the results of that research. However, no researcher has the right to have their research published, and journals are not required to publish every submission they receive. The editors of Academy of Management Perspectives have affected the journal’s credibility by choosing to publish this article, thus legitimizing its inaccurate and divisive positions.

Analyzing how companies choose to react to events in society is an extremely valuable research topic. Understanding these reactions can generate further insights, and possibly assist other companies in reacting appropriately or productively. However, one of the many problems with the article’s approach to this topic is the article’s fundamental concepts: the definition of “woke”, and (more…)

Just Say No

In every workplace there are tasks that aren’t enjoyable to do, or that aren’t part of formal job descriptions but are important for building positive relationships and community. However, research has shown that these kinds of tasks – which some researchers have labeled “office housework” –  tend to be done more often by women and by members of demographic minorities. It’s also been suggested that doing these tasks can have a negative impact on the careers of those who regularly take them on.

The new book The No Club: Putting A Stop To Women’s Dead-End Work, by Linda Babcock, Brenda Peyser, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart,  is a very thoughtful analysis of this phenomenon. Coincidentally, I came across the book when I was thinking about how “office housework” functions in academic workplaces. I recently left an academic job, but I still regularly get requests to (more…)

The Weight of a Name

When an organization is hiring someone to fill a job, it’s very difficult to avoid bias in the hiring process – because, at some point, the hiring decision is subjective. The applicants for the job may have very similar qualifications and experience, which then usually leads to assessments such as how well each applicant would “fit” within the organization. “Fit” is a subjective assessment, and when subjective assessments become an exercise in “how much is this person like the people that are already here”, that’s when unintended or explicit bias can affect the hiring decision.

Numerous studies have shown that hiring decisions can be biased by factors like the ethnicity of the applicant’s name, their appearance, and their social class. Now, two economists, Qi Ge and Stephen Wu, have published a very interesting research study of another possible source of bias in hiring: how difficult it is to pronounce the applicant’s name.

The data that these researchers used for their study was taken from (more…)

I See You: The Effects of Representation

Many organizations think that being inclusive is simply an issue of hiring members of underrepresented groups. But people hired on that basis are not going to stick around if they feel isolated or that they stand out, or that they’ve been hired just because they’re “diverse”. One very important element in inclusivity is representation; people want to see others like them, and also want to see those other people being respected and valued.

Part of a new study by a group of US researchers looks at the effects of representation in a place that isn’t often examined: the readings that students are assigned in university courses. There has been plenty of discussion over the past few decades about “the canon” in various academic fields and what determines whether a work is a “classic”  that all students should be familiar with. The researchers investigated whether the gender balance of assigned readings in a political-science course – the number of readings written by men and the number of readings written by women – affected female and male students’ self-efficacy: their confidence in their own ability to succeed. The study looked at (more…)

From Small Things….

Economics is a male-dominated profession in post-secondary education and in industry. In the last few years, some economists have been challenging that norm and calling out institutionalized practices and conditions that discourage more diversity in their profession. Both the Canadian Economics Association and the American Economics Association have undertaken surveys of their membership to identify the representation of different demographic groups, and to hear from members of those groups about their academic or workplace experiences. Now, a group of 101 economists has released the results of a study that looks at gender-related behaviour in a significant part of academic work: the research seminar.

At these seminars, (more…)

Into the Gap

Happy 2021!

The Globe and Mail newspaper is currently running a series of articles titled Power Gap: a data-based investigation into gender inequality in Canadian workplaces. I’m really pleased to see attention and resources being directed towards understanding this issue. To date, the articles are doing a very good job of unpicking why there are more men than women in positions of power in Canadian workplaces, and why men are generally better-paid. But the series also shows how difficult it is to address these imbalances in a substantive way, because of data limitations. It’s hard to solve a problem without fully understanding what’s causing the problem.

The complete explanation of the Power Gap project methodology is paywalled, but to summarize it, the analysis relies on data from “sunshine lists” – lists of public sector employees with an annual salary above a certain level, which most Canadian provincial governments release every year. Because these lists are not consistently formatted across provinces – for example, not all provinces release employees’ full names – the data on the lists had to be combined and then adjusted so the data were comparable.

Also, since the purpose of the Power Gap project was to investigate gender inequality, the employees’ gender had to be added to the data set. Gender data were collected through several different methods, including (more…)