Podcast Episode 7: Frank Dobbin

Transcript

Upon Further Review: Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo
Episode 7 with Frank Dobbin

Division of Social Science
Faculty of Arts & Sciences
Harvard University

(Recorded 02/28/2023)

[00:00:00.00] [MUSIC PLAYING]

[00:00:07.53] LARRY BOBO: Welcome to another edition of Upon Further Review– Frontline Conversations with Dean Bobo. My name is Larry Bobo, the Dean of Social Sciences here at Harvard University. I’m delighted to have with me as a guest for the discussion Frank Dobbin, who is the Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Sociology and who is co-author of the really important new book– Getting to Diversity– What Works and What Doesn’t. And before turning to that, let me say first, welcome, Frank. Thank you for agreeing to be a part of this session.

[00:00:46.18] FRANK DOBBIN: Thanks for having me, Larry.

[00:00:47.28] LARRY BOBO: Oh, really, it’s absolutely my pleasure. And before leaping into the substance of the book itself, I think I would tell our listeners just a little bit about you that in many respects, you could be described as a sociologist of organizations, as an economic sociologist, and that indeed, in some ways, earlier in your career, had more of a comparative focus to it, right?

[00:01:13.68] FRANK DOBBIN: Indeed.

[00:01:14.63] LARRY BOBO: That that’s where you started. So then how do we get the transition to studying workplace diversity issues with a special focus on the US? How do you get there?

[00:01:25.41] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, this is something I’ve always been interested in. I grew up during the Civil Rights movement and paid a lot of attention to it. My parents were big on going to social movement protests, so civil rights movement when I was very small, and then anti-war movement, women’s movement.

[00:01:45.02] So from pretty early age, I had the impression that the world was going to be revolutionized by the civil rights movement, and I didn’t really see that happening. I grew up here in Boston, in a suburb. And wow, what happened during the school desegregation, busing mess of those years, the level of racial strife. Sure, didn’t look like the civil rights movement, had changed a lot.

[00:02:14.23] And then fast forward to when I began graduate school, in the first year or two, I was working on a project with some other people on how firms responded to equal opportunity, affirmative action legislation. And what was interesting there is the things they were doing even then– and this was with Lauren Edelman, and Anne Swidler, John Meyer, Dick Scott. Even then, it didn’t really look like the things that companies were doing were going to have any effect on promoting equality of opportunity, so that– I did a bunch of studies over the years of what firms did and why.

[00:02:55.73] And every study I did, my thinking was that the study was about– look at the ridiculous things firms think are going to fix this problem now. What’s going to be next? But a lot of people and the courts tended to buy what companies were doing, so that realization got me and Sandra Kalev about 20 years ago to start this now very long-term project, trying to understand what kinds of diversity programs are effective and what kinds aren’t.

[00:03:30.85] LARRY BOBO: That’s great. So this intellectual arc to your work here, but would you also have thought of yourself as a sociologist of race, a sociologist of gender, or just kind of more incidentally as those things figure into workplace dynamics? And I’ll tell you part of why I’m asking that question. It’s because early on in the book, you suggest that the types of issues sociologists focus on, or how they frame the key questions for their work, have undergone an important change, that there was an era where the question really was about to what extent can people translate their individual human capital characteristics into attainments in the workforce, into occupational mobility and better earnings. And you suggest that there’s now been an important shift in analytical focus. So maybe you can tell me a bit about that shift and what the implications are for directing your work.

[00:04:40.78] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, I think there’s been a really important shift from the early mobility studies, which just looked at individual characteristics, like educational attainment and its effects on social mobility, on income, and positional mobility, occupational mobility from generation to generation. Now, we’re looking at, increasingly, since the early 1980s, at the organizational factors that shape mobility for people by gender, race, and ethnicity, and people hadn’t been looking at that before. So some of my earliest work with was with Jim Baron, when he was at the Business School at Stanford, where I did my PhD in the Sociology Department.

[00:05:26.98] And he very early on, with Bill Bielby, had recognized that a lot of what’s going on in producing inequality by race, gender, and ethnicity was within the organization, within the firm. And so we needed to, really, pay attention to organizational factors, not just human capital factors, skills, experience on the job, parental education, things like that. So I feel like there’s been a very radical change in the way we think about mobility and where people end up in life, people’s life chances.

[00:06:04.87] And I do consider myself to be a sociologist of race and gender mostly because I feel like that’s the organization is where a lot of the action has been in the last 40 years, a lot of the research action, and that’s where I’ve been focused. If you want to understand where people end up, you kind of need to understand what happens to them when they start work, not just before they start work.

[00:06:29.23] LARRY BOBO: Now, that’s great, and so that really does set the stage, I think, for the questions you pose and the research you report on in getting to diversity. Let me then ask about two ways in which I think of the book, not so much as startling, but as potentially contradicting many individual’s priors, some of their starting assumptions, and those two assumptions, just to state them directly, are as follows.

[00:07:01.92] First, that we’ve had a lot of compelling work done regarding the existence of implicit attitudes or unconscious bias that can affect human behavior in many different settings, including what is likely to happen in workplace organizations. Therefore, it makes a great deal of sense to attend to some way of remedying unconscious bias. And secondly, that coming out of the civil rights era, coming out of affirmative action, we’ve seen a real growth in African-American middle class, presumably a growing Latinx middle class, likewise in Asian-American middle class. Haven’t we seen a lot of progress in the workplace? And it seems to me that your book starts off by attempting to problematize both of those prior assumptions.

[00:08:05.51] FRANK DOBBIN: Indeed. So when it comes to trying to fix unconscious bias, one of the– well, the first thing we tackle in the book is, are our strategies for fixing unconscious bias working? And our strategies kind of fall into three buckets. We try to train away unconscious bias. We try to regulate away unconscious bias by putting in HR personnel rules that prevent managers from acting on bias, prevent them from discriminating. And the third thing we do is we implement complaint and grievance systems that are supposed to address bias in individual managers. They’re supposed to either make them better or move them out of the organization.

[00:08:55.48] And what we’re seeing in our data analysis where we look at about 830 companies over about 45 years, and we look at all of the practices they put into place, and we do some statistical magic to figure out what the individual effects of those practices are on average. And the things in these three buckets don’t work. They, in fact, tend to backfire.

[00:09:25.24] So putting people in a room or putting them online and trying to convince them that they’re biased and they need to change how they’ve been behaving, that doesn’t just do nothing, it systematically reduces the race, ethnic, gender diversity of the managerial workforce, the jobs that are hardest to change. Same for bureaucratic rules, so for example, job tests or performance relations, those are supposed to– they’re supposed to prevent managers from promoting, hiring people just on the basis of friendship, or race, gender, and they actually backfire as well.

[00:10:11.94] And grievance procedures backfire in some of the most egregious ways because, as we know, those of us in the– who have been studying grievance procedures know, as Don Tomaskovic-Devey has found recently, if you file a complaint with the federal government, you’re about 16% chance of having a positive outcome. And over 60% of people who file those complaints lose their jobs as a consequence.

[00:10:42.36] And that’s true at the workplace level too. If you use the company grievance procedure, you’re pretty likely to lose your job and leave. And often, you’ll take a bunch of your friends with you who realize that the organization is not really on their side. So unfortunately, those things, which are the most common go-to solutions for companies and the things that consultants have been hawking for years, they don’t just do nothing. They have adverse effects.

[00:11:14.55] LARRY BOBO: The second part of the question was about a growth in– well, social mobility for and growth in, let’s say, a minority middle class and of women moving into ranks, say, we think of the kind of transformation that may have taken place in the legal profession as one sign.

[00:11:34.13] FRANK DOBBIN: Yeah, and it is interesting to look at change over time, especially if you think about the changing educational attainment of women in Black, Hispanic, and Asian-American populations over time. The educational attainment has really skyrocketed for white women and for all of those minoritized groups, but we’re not seeing that reflected in the managerial workforce in corporate America.

[00:12:08.58] Now, we see it– we see a little more of it in some places. The military does slightly better. Some of the professions do a little better. Although, if you talk to David Wilkins over in the law school and look at the research that his team and others in that field who were looking at the careers of Black lawyers, for example, if you look at that research, it’s not looking like progress is happening very quickly.

[00:12:38.58] What we see in corporate America is that a lot of the lower level jobs have been dramatically diversified in the last 40 years. So entry level positions, technician jobs, operator jobs. But when you look at management jobs, they really haven’t been diversified very rapidly. Now, within a firm, you’re going to see growth, for example, in Black managers in a medium size large firm.

[00:13:13.17] But if you look at the likelihood that Black women or Black men in corporate America will get into management jobs, about 4% of Black women were managers in corporate America. 4% of all people in corporate America who were Black women were managers in 1985. And in 2018, it was about 5%. So that is very slow growth. During that period, white men, about 16% of them were in management jobs. I mean, that is such slow growth that it’ll be hundreds of years before those lines converge. Black men were at 6% in 1985 and they’re at 6% in the last year we have data for, 2018.

[00:14:09.71] So yeah, there are more Black people in corporate America. That’s partly because of immigration. It’s partly from the Caribbean especially. It’s partly because of reduced discrimination for entry level jobs, operative jobs, technician jobs, clerical jobs. But Black Americans, men and women, are not much more likely to make it into management than they were 40 years ago. And that is discouraging.

[00:14:38.60] LARRY BOBO: That’s very discouraging. And that’s part of why I wanted to stop there because you show a figure very early in the book. It may be the very first figure on this trend in the intersection of race and gender in terms of representation and management level positions. And I think if I’m recalling it correctly, there is some slight progress between the early ’70s and, say, roughly 1980. And it looks like gaps are narrowing.

[00:15:07.12] And then essentially, from that point forward, it’s at best flat. And if there’s any change, it’s maybe a slight drop in the heavy, let’s say, overrepresentation of white males in that category. And I know it isn’t the focus of what you do, but I would love to hear what you might say about what accounts for the timing of that inflection? What brings the halt to what looked like an era of progress prior to, say, 1980 and 1985?

[00:15:42.25] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, something momentous happens in 1980. Ronald Reagan is elected. And he’s elected on a platform of eliminating red tape. You’ll recall that the economy had been in tough shape in the ’70s. So two of his goals were to decimate the EEOC– he did appoint Clarence Thomas to head the EEOC– and to close the OFCCP, the part of the Department of Labor that enforces affirmative action regulations for federal contractors.

[00:16:18.94] So business got the message that there was no more Sheriff in town, not just that there was a new Sheriff in town. And it looks like they just stopped paying so much attention to trying to make change. Now, in the ’60s and ’70s, we did see pretty rapid growth on this same indicator, representation in management, but it just goes flat, almost flat for those four groups; Black and Hispanic men and women.

[00:16:52.46] So progress is a little bit better for Asian-Americans. Their both men and women are still making some progress. But keep in mind that through the H-1B visa program and immigration regulations in general, Asian-Americans who came to the US often were very highly educated. So if you look at the progress that Asian-Americans have made, they’re not really where they should be compared to whites. They should be doing as well in getting management jobs as whites are, and they’re not.

[00:17:26.69] And white women made a lot of progress as late as the late 1990s. But since then, they’ve been almost flat. So I feel like we have a lot of– we have a long way to go for all of these groups, for all seven historically disadvantaged groups. And in the data, we’re not able to look at smaller groups like Native Americans. There just aren’t enough of them to make our statistical models work but–

[00:17:54.02] LARRY BOBO: Before I shift gears a little, let me ask about something that’s often discussed in this arena, and that’s a need for cultural change or transformation within an organization. And I know it’s not something I read as being a real focus of your work, but how does so much discourse around bringing about greater diversity in the workforce perhaps get focused on that ambition? And perhaps, let me be a little bit reductive with that culture transformation focusing heavily around what I think you would have labeled is diversity training as part of what needs to happen and may be to a degree anti-harassment work as well.

[00:18:45.41] FRANK DOBBIN: I think the problem here is with how we’ve been structuring both diversity training and anti-harassment training. The problem with diversity training is that the most common form has two components. The first component is to try to convince you that you are biased even though it might be unconscious. And people don’t respond too well to that. And there have been lots of studies showing that people walk out of those rooms where they’re just introduced to implicit bias material angry or frustrated or disbelieving.

[00:19:23.58] And then the second component is to convince you that what you’ve been doing has been against the law and you need to stop it. So the most common form of diversity training today is anti-bias with legalistic content. And people just respond negatively to that. It does not bring them on board. So it’s clear that if you want to make cultural change in organizations, that will change the culture, but not in the way you had intended because it angers people. And there are just so many studies that show that and our analyses suggest the same.

[00:20:06.59] The typical form that sexual harassment training takes for the general population is similar in that you’re told that you don’t know what harassment is so you better learn what it is. And then you’re told– you’re given a list of things you can’t do, things that are against the law. And for a lot of men, those are things– some of the things are things they have been doing at work.

[00:20:32.58] And so people– the psychological studies show that people who are not on board with the idea that harassment is a problem at work, white men, that they’re antagonized by this kind of training. And they, for example, become less likely to believe people who file complaints because they think the whole thing is BS.

[00:20:56.99] So these approaches are changing culture, but they’re not changing culture in the right way. And there are some ways to tweak both kinds of training. Training that’s only about cultural inclusion, we’re not trying to convince you you’re biased, we’re not trying to tell you that you’ve been breaking the law, we’re just going to talk to you about how, as a manager, you could be more inclusive by listening to your employees more often, by asking employees how they feel about changes in the workplace, by including employees in decision-making. All the things that promote culture inclusion, if those are included in the training, the training works better and can actually have some positive effects. So it’s not that there’s no good way to do training, it’s just that we’re not doing it.

[00:21:49.25] When it comes to harassment training, the kind that most managers get is actually showing some positive effects. But harassment training for managers is different than what I described before, which is just, here’s what harassment is and here’s what you can’t do anymore. It’s about how, as a manager, you might be able to change your workplace to reduce harassment. And one of the main takeaways is if you think harassment is going on, don’t put your head in the sand. Get out in front of it. Talk to the people who you think might be involved and try to resolve the problem immediately.

[00:22:29.70] Because the message that people get from legalistic harassment training is one strike and you’re not out. You have to have three instances of hostile environment harassment to take somebody through the grievance procedure. So a lot of managers are just waiting. Is that bad enough? How long do I have to wait before I get involved?

[00:22:55.38] Interestingly, if you train managers to be allies rather than treating them themselves as the accused for not preventing harassment from the get-go, they seem to have positive attitudes and they seem to learn that they can intervene if they think something wrong or something bad is going on.

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[00:23:42.64] LARRY BOBO: So part of your lexicon for an antidote to the missteps of intervention efforts in the past is to call for a democratization of career systems. So what do you mean by the democratization of career systems, and how far into the culture of corporate America has that idea progressed, would you say?

[00:24:12.81] FRANK DOBBIN: There are some firms that do this. Deloitte started in the 1990s to try to open up their career systems to women in particular because the heads of the firm realized that half of the new recruits, professionals in accounting and consulting, they hired were women, but they weren’t promoting any of them to partner. And that was just a crazy way. They were basically training people for their competitors. That was just a crazy way to run a business. So they’re a good example. They did a lot of the things that we find to be effective.

[00:24:49.63] So most companies– most people in most companies who are at the top and middle ranks define their company as meritocratic. People will defend their company from the get-go. We’re fair. We never make biased decisions. Everybody has a chance to get ahead here. And I think people genuinely believe that. We do a lot of interviews, as well as looking at quantitative data, and we hear that time and again.

[00:25:16.54] But when those same people start to investigate where there are problems– and one way they can investigate where there are problems is to join a diversity task force or often they’re just asked by the CEO to join the task force. They come together and look at the data. And if they have the HR information systems data that most companies collect, they can track what happens to people’s careers, people from different backgrounds.

[00:25:46.36] So they can look at an incoming cohort of whatever consultants or analysts in investment banking, they can look at an incoming cohort and they can see what happens to people. And they start to see that some people get counseled out of trying to go for partner or they start– some kinds of people. Or they start to see that a certain group just isn’t being recruited. Often, they begin to see that parts of the career system aren’t democratic. That is, aren’t open to everybody.

[00:26:21.95] So what we look at specifically in the book are recruitment. So firms often have formal recruitment systems. Most big companies have had them since the ’30s or ’40s, where they go to universities to look for new recruits every year. They tend to go to the Alma maters of existing managers.

[00:26:47.00] So if your existing managers are white men, you’re going to be going into historically white institutions. And while those institutions may now be open to all groups, you’re not going to find the kinds of Black people you’re going to find if you go to historically Black institutions. You’re not going to find the numbers of Hispanic people you’ll find if you go to Hispanic serving institutions. So just doing that has a huge effect on subsequent managerial diversity. So these people are being hired as rookies. They’re not managers yet. But if you search at those schools, it makes a big difference.

[00:27:25.45] LARRY BOBO: Well, let me ask then– let me pause on that notion of how to, I guess we might say, democratize the recruitment strategies as you put it, the entryway strategies. How do you get firms to do that? Or what is it that prompts firms to really engage in a transformation in their recruitment strategies?

[00:27:49.70] FRANK DOBBIN: It’s been happening since the early 1960s. Firms have made a commitment to doing it. The problem is that when there is a recession, they usually stop doing it. Like they’ll pull back on all recruitment and then they’ll have a low cost– when they go back into recruitment, they’ll have a low cost strategy, which means just doing what they did before, which is going to the Alma maters of their current managers, sending those people to their Alma maters.

[00:28:19.09] So some companies have had a cycle of doing this and not doing it. A lot of companies started doing it again after the murder of George Floyd with the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. And companies report that it’s pretty effective. They are managing to diversify the recruits. The trick is to get all companies to do this just as part of regular recruiting, even if they don’t think they have a racial diversity problem today, and getting them not to retrench whenever there’s a recession.

[00:28:58.86] LARRY BOBO: And one of the other strategies you identify, and I can certainly see this operating in some of the organizations that I work with outside of the university, is pushing folks to, as you put it, democratize networks internally, that things need to happen to, in particular, create the kind of mentoring opportunities and relationships that really do put people in line to move up in an organization.

[00:29:33.78] FRANK DOBBIN: Yeah, that’s another thing that, in a way, even formal recruitment programs are kind of informal because they just use the existing managers’ networks. Mentoring programs are often completely informal or not completely democratic.

[00:29:53.40] When I say completely informal, I talk to CEOs today who say, yeah. I mean, we do a lot of mentoring. We don’t have a formal program because we don’t believe in forced artificial matches. People have to connect to somebody and you see it in their eyes when you first meet them. This is a person like me. Well, when you do that, when that’s your principle, basically the White guys are going to get mentors and nobody else is. That’s what all the data show from many different studies. So making a formal mentoring program that matches people and extending it to everybody.

[00:30:29.49] So another mistake that firms make is that the mentoring program is only for the talent that they see as promising. So when you only provide a mentoring program for people who are in the 3% of your top recruits, you’re not going to get the person in– well, for one thing, you’re mentoring people who you’ve already decided are superstars. Some companies do have a special mentoring program for people of color. Yeah, but there are 10 people in it every year and there are 1,000 people of color working in the company. So how is that going to work?

[00:31:08.83] So what democratizing mentoring means is offering every single person in the firm, even if you don’t think that they want to become a manager or an executive, offering every single person a mentor. And you know what, people take them up on that. People are happy to do it.

[00:31:26.14] LARRY BOBO: Can you unpack that a little bit more for me? Because I can think of the kind of struggles a CEO might have making key unit or division managers engage in that kind of mentoring activity. You have someone who’s saying, listen, I’ve got a bottom line. I’ve got some goals I have to achieve. Time and energy are finite. And now you’re going to tell me to go devote my time to someone who I don’t know anything about, I’m not sure I can work with, and I can’t necessarily predict with reasonable high probability that it’s going to work. How do organizations do that?

[00:32:08.71] FRANK DOBBIN: Mentoring in the corporate world is much like mentoring in academia. So we mentor people all the time in our jobs. And who gets more out of those relationships? It depends on the particular relationship, but we get a lot– I’ve learned so many different computer programs, new modeling strategies, new theories by being some of these mentor and having them say, wait, you got to read this. You don’t know about this?

[00:32:36.52] So this also occurs in organizations. And when I get that kind of pushback when I’m trying to say, you got to mentor everybody, I send people– there are a couple of studies of Sun Microsystems internal mentoring program, very scientific studies. So they do before and after. And they’re comparing people who have been involved in the programs to people who haven’t. And it’s kind of randomized. So it’s not 100% randomized, but who you get is definitely randomized as a mentor or as a protege.

[00:33:14.02] So the proteges see much faster career progression and much longer retention at the firm than people who could have been proteges but weren’t. But the mentors see even bigger increases in– or decreases in time to promotion and increases in retention. So joining a mentoring program is better for the mentors than it is for the proteges, and it’s good for everybody.

[00:33:42.88] LARRY BOBO: Now, that’s a good– so my next question was going to be this exact question of exemplars that make the case that this really is an effective strategy. So I wonder how confident you are or unequivocal on this issue the research literature is on the beneficial effects of just pushing ahead with thoroughly democratized mentoring program.

[00:34:10.75] FRANK DOBBIN: I mean, we see huge positive effects on managerial diversity after a company is put in a mentoring program. The biggest or next to biggest effects depends on the industry of anything you could do. This is just one of the best things you can do. I don’t know of any study– I mean, there are a bunch of studies that show positive effects on the mentors.

[00:34:34.02] We do a bunch of interviews. In the interviews people say, this changed my life. I started to see the world differently. I learned new strategies. I mean, I learned a lot about business strategy from my protege who just came out of business school or just came out of computer science. So I don’t see any evidence that this isn’t a great idea. But unfortunately, companies have been moving in this direction toward special mentoring for the high potentials. People they’ve already identified.

[00:35:10.17] LARRY BOBO: It seems that that’s– but that’s the cautious strategy, especially if you were anticipating some pushback, even if it’s not intense pushback, just some hesitation on the part of unit managers to do something that certainly will require a commitment of their time and energy and that they aren’t a priority convinced is going to have a payoff for them.

[00:35:33.60] FRANK DOBBIN: Yeah. I do think that people who have some experience mentoring become champions in firms when a program gets put into place. What I see is they’ll say to other people, don’t worry about that. You’re going to love it. And if you have enough people like that, I feel like usually CEOs don’t have a lot of trouble getting this going.

[00:36:00.33] And one thing to keep in mind is you don’t have to mention diversity at all. So the thing about a wide open mentoring program is it’s not a diversity program. It’s a talent development program and it’s a retention program. And the other thing that– the other thing that some CEOs do is they show the retention numbers for companies that have put these programs in and they skyrocket.

[00:36:26.45] LARRY BOBO: Great. Let me move on to one of your other key messages here, which is that it’s important to democratize access to new skill and management training opportunities.

[00:36:43.21] FRANK DOBBIN: So like mentoring in a lot of companies, skill training and management training are offered informally. In a retailer, the shift manager will show somebody who’s a cashier how to do payroll or how to assign people to shifts. And then when they’re out for a week, that person will take over. And then next time there’s an opening, they’ll become a shift manager.

[00:37:15.55] So Walmart, for example, has put in these training academies where, for one thing, they train everybody. So they train all the cashiers. Even knowing that there’s high turnover in this industry, they train all the cashiers so they do a better job. So turnover is reduced. So that program pays for itself right away. They also have supervisory training for people who are interested in it, and you can sign up for that.

[00:37:48.01] So it hasn’t been going on forever, but in the first few iterations– and, of course, COVID has interrupted it– but in the first few years of it, it looked like it was dramatically increasing people of color who move into management jobs or first line supervisory jobs.

[00:38:06.09] So any kind of training that’s open to everybody will do two things. It will tell people that you’re committed to them, that you’re going to invest some money in their improving skills, which means you want them to stay around. So when somebody gets a dollar more offer from a competing employer in the same town, they’re going to stick with you because they think, well, yeah, I could get a dollar more now or I could wait and be promoted to a supervisory position.

[00:38:40.32] But another thing that any kind of training does is, as long as it’s done by internal managers, it broadens people’s networks. So people get to know a manager in a different department who’s doing, like the payroll part of the training, they get to know somebody in accounting. And maybe if they’re good with numbers, they end up in accounting. Often, training programs either rotate people through departments or rotate managers through the training curriculum.

[00:39:09.86] And one of the problems we face in the workplace today is a workplace can be very integrated in the aggregate, but at the department level, we’re just looking at silos of people who look the same. HR tends to be women of color. Finance tends to be white and Asian men. You go down the list, logistics tends to be men of color.

[00:39:34.46] So getting people outside of their normal groups is one way to– we know that contact across groups is one of the best ways to reduce bias. So any kind of training that mixes people up is likely to help people find a career path that appeals to them and also make connections to managers in other places who can serve as informal mentors or keep an eye out for a job for them.

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[00:40:28.87] LARRY BOBO: Let’s turn to the fourth arena for democratization, and that concerns a corporate approach to or the business organization’s approach to the work/life balance and how things can be done to better facilitate both retention and prospects for promotion when you’re very mindful about those work/life balance issues.

[00:40:53.82] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, as in these other domains, work/life balance is often– the supports are often offered informally. So if your– even if your organization doesn’t have a formal parental leave program, doesn’t have a formal flextime program or a formal child care program– those are the three main kinds of work/life programs that people desire in surveys– if you happen to be the right hand person of the CEO, you’re going to get whatever you need when you have a new baby at home or when you have an ailing parent because they want to keep you around. They’re going to do whatever they can. And you don’t even have to ask for it sometime. Take an extra six weeks off. I think you’re going to need it. We’ll pay for it.

[00:41:47.95] The problem is that when companies don’t, A, make programs formal and make them sound like they’re rights, like you have a right to ask for this, and also get the word out to supervisors that it would be good for people to use this program, like to use flextime or use parenteral leave, it’s going to help with retention, it’s going to make them committed to us. They’re not going to leave for a silly reason because we did something for them. We tried to make it work for them.

[00:42:20.26] So there’s an interesting study in the book Overloaded by Erin Kelly and Phyllis Moen. Kelly is at MIT Sloan School. Moen’s in sociology at Minnesota. And they look– they do a random controlled trial in a Fortune 500 company, where the main intervention– the company already has some work/life programs. People aren’t using them. The main intervention is to try to get managers to see that it’s a good idea to let people use them and that this is company policy, that we want people to use these programs, that they’re there to be used.

[00:42:58.26] And they see dramatic reductions in stress, increases in retention, increases in performance. I mean, it’s just good business to provide these things to people who are struggling because those struggles are– they’re not permanent. People have small kids or one of their kids get sick, their spouse gets sick for a few months, they have a parent who’s dying, they’re going to be back, but in the short-term, providing some kind of support really helps to retain people and that helps them to be promoted.

[00:43:34.18] So what we see is that even the cheapest forms of each of these interventions, so just having a flextime policy that says you can ask your boss for flextime, they don’t have to say yes, having a parental leave policy that is simply, this is what the federal– this is what the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 guarantees you three months of unpaid leave if you have a baby, here’s how you apply. That’s what the policy is. Just that, here’s how you apply, has huge effect on, not only white women and all groups of women of color, but all groups of men of color.

[00:44:16.90] And the main reason for that is because white couples are more likely to be able to afford for one person to go part time for a while or to stop working for a while. Black, Latinx, and Asian-American couples have less wealth and lower incomes on average. So when stuff happens and they’re having trouble balancing everything, somebody’s likely to change jobs just to find a job that’s closer to work. And if there’s some flexibility, you might be able to keep them in the job. So here, people don’t see work/life programs as a racial equity–

[00:45:07.79] LARRY BOBO: But it clearly is.

[00:45:08.75] FRANK DOBBIN: But it’s a huge racial equity intervention. And if you really care about improving the lot of men and women of color, it’s one of the first things you should be paying attention to.

[00:45:21.68] LARRY BOBO: Exactly. Toward the end of the book, you talk about principles that should be guiding organizational thinking here. And you use the phrase that in order to really make diversity work, these processes, in a way, have to become baked in to the way an organization functions. So what is it they’re trying to bake in? Just what are the principles in effect? And then I have a separate question, which is, how do we get there? What’s the spark? What makes this happen in an organization?

[00:46:09.48] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, in terms of how to bake this in, one of the most effective things you can do is to create a permanent task force that looks at this, looks at the data every couple of months, comes up with solutions to the pressing problem of the moment. So it might be recruitment of Hispanic women. It might be promotion of white women after they had their second child. It might be– it looks like we’re hemorrhaging people of color after they’ve been here for eight years. And it seems like we’re not promoting them at the same rates that we’re promoting whites, and that’s why they leave. So how are we going to fix that?

[00:46:55.01] Companies that create a permanent task force, usually– as I was saying before, usually the CEO asks department managers to either join the task force or nominate a Lieutenant. They come together every two months, look at the data, brainstorm solutions, come up with solutions to those particular problems, go back and implement them.

[00:47:18.50] LARRY BOBO: But let me ask then, so what’s the charge of the task force? Because it sounds as if this is something very different from, say, helping to create what many firms are doing, which is, let’s say, employee resource groups that are kind of distinctive ethnic or sexual orientation or gender affinity groups. It’s different from that and it’s different from– or a piece of, depending on how you think about it, routine HR processes. I mean, what’s the charge, distinctive charge to the task force?

[00:47:57.63] FRANK DOBBIN: The charge is to try to solve the problem of stalled diversity, exactly the problem that I talked about at the top of the hour. Most companies, if they look at their own data, they’ve seen very little progress in management diversity. If by management diversity you mean what’s the likelihood of a Black woman in this company will be in management, that hasn’t changed even if there are more Black women in the company.

[00:48:27.21] So if that is the challenge, and increasingly companies are taking that to be the challenge, then it’s an ongoing problem and there isn’t a single solution. Because you’ll solve the recruitment problem for Hispanics, say, and then three years later, you’ll realize, oh, now the problem is retention. We did something wrong here. So what do we need to do now? So now you have to solve the next type of the problem. They’re not signing up for mentors. Why is that, the people we’ve recruited through the targeted recruitment.

[00:49:04.49] So it’s an ongoing process. And if this were any other issue in the organization, it would be treated managerially. So if it’s product development, you don’t develop– you don’t have product development once and then go home. That’s a unit. And it’s usually– it’s usually a cross-unit team that’s developing new products. And unless you’re– unless you’re just making rice, any firm has a product development function. So we need a diversity management function that’s focused on how do you open opportunity to everybody across the lifecycle, across their career cycle? And what do we need to fix next?

[00:49:53.57] So the single practice that works most consistently across industries and that has really big payoffs is putting in a task force like this because you can get consultants to come in and do this, but they’re not going to– they’re going to design solutions but then they’re going to need to come back next year and design other solutions to other problems. And they’re not going to be able to take the solutions back to their departments and tell people, this is what we’re doing now. So if it’s targeted recruitment, you’ve got managers going back and saying, I need six people to sign up to go to Howard University next week. And we’re not leaving this meeting until I have six names.

[00:50:39.72] One of the things being on a task force does is it gets managers, who are mostly white men, to look at the data and to say to themselves, it’s not a meritocracy because we’re doing something wrong. We’re losing great talent. We’re losing–

[00:50:59.49] LARRY BOBO: So is the task force the vehicle to creating accountability? Is it the vehicle to do part of what you mentioned may be critical here, which is really set goals, fairly explicit outcomes that you’re out to obtain?

[00:51:15.16] FRANK DOBBIN: Task forces do tend to set goals. Although, they’re not always formal goals. What’s been happening since the murder of George Floyd, it was starting to happen in tech maybe 10 years earlier, is that more companies are setting explicit goals from the top. That is, the CEO is in on that.

[00:51:37.58] And some companies are pushing those goals down to the manager level so that individual managers have goals. Companies manage everything with goals. You’ve got like a cost reduction target. You’ve got a reduction in force target. You’ve got a profit increase target. You’ve got to decrease these expenses. Why wouldn’t companies have specific goals here?

[00:52:04.06] LARRY BOBO: Well, I can– I totally agree with that, but we are in a legal and political climate where the idea of racial or ethnic or I presume even gender targets are going to come into question to some degree, especially the racial ethnic ones because they’re viewed as such problematic categories under, let’s say, the last 10 to 15 years of Supreme Court interpretations. I mean, what do we do in that legal climate or even a political climate where you have governors and state legislatures almost banning use of the term equity.

[00:52:42.69] FRANK DOBBIN: It’s a big problem, obviously. In the last couple of years, companies have been willing to go out on a limb and to start to– so something like– last time I looked, something like 300 of the biggest companies in the US had started to publicize their progress so far in a detailed way; race, by gender, ethnicity, by six job titles, 10 job categories. The EEOC data are 10 so some people just put that online.

[00:53:21.08] They weren’t doing that for a long time because they were worried about the legal consequences. And they certainly were not publishing targets because, exactly, they were worried about what the courts would do or they were worried about reverse discrimination suits. I mean, I think it’s encouraging that so many CEOs have said, you know what, damn the legal consequences. We’re going to do this. Because we’re not making progress.

[00:53:49.02] Because, I have to say, the resurgence of Black Lives Matter really led a lot of companies to do some contemplation about where they were and how quickly things were changing and really think about whether they needed to do something more. And it’s encouraging that so many have set targets. I mean, we’ll see. Will the Supreme Court strike down those targets? Maybe. I mean, I’m not quite seeing how a case gets to them, but I suppose maybe it will.

[00:54:23.92] LARRY BOBO: Well, let me ask you a question in a way to begin to wrap us up here in a way. And if you were to think 15, 25 years down the road, where do you think we’ll be in terms of what have become more routinized corporate practices with respect to diversity and inclusion and how different, say, will that first figure, the opening figure of the book be 20 years from now, given what you see is the dynamics at work?

[00:55:05.07] FRANK DOBBIN: Well, I’m an optimist so I have to say, if you look at the first figure in the book, it’s kind of hard to be optimistic in my figure. But I’m an optimist. I do think that there’s a lot of social movement activity now. There is a generational shift. A lot of people are recognizing that there’s a problem. On the other hand, that movement has maybe helped to spur a movement on the right against all of this, which gives support to the likes of Ron DeSantis.

[00:55:42.65] So I’m optimistic because companies have really started to focus on the problem and they’re not denying that there’s a problem anymore. What makes me a little pessimistic is that the thing that most companies did in response to the resurgence of Black Lives Matter was to hire new diversity trainers. So they’re doubling down on what they’ve been doing for a long time. But publishing the numbers, there’s no denying it. If you’re staring at those numbers every year, at some point you ought to start feeling bad about what’s going on, and that should induce some kind of accountability.

[00:56:24.02] So just a plug for the social sciences, what we argue in this book, some of the things are no surprise to other social scientists because individual practices have been studied by lots of people. So there are a bunch of studies of diversity, of implicit bias training that suggest that it’s probably not going to do anything. There are a bunch of studies of grievance procedures that show that through backlash, they backfire very significantly. There are a lot of studies of performance rating systems that show that they are not fair and that they’re not likely to promote racial or gender equity.

[00:57:08.01] So there’s now a big body of research that shows the ineffectiveness of a bunch of the things that we’re looking at in this book. And for example, I mentioned the Kelly and Moen book. There’s now a fair number of studies of work/life programs showing that particular interventions, like training the supervisors to let people use the flextime policies, can be very effective.

[00:57:37.95] So I feel like on the social science side, if you’re a manager or an executive who cares to know what works, it’s easy to find now. And I think the comparative advantage of this book is we look at everything that companies seem to have been doing over the last 50 years at once. And so we can sort out the relative effects of different things. And if you had a half a million dollars to spend, what should you spend it on? And I think the book makes it pretty clear. But the research is out there. So if– we have evidence-based movements in a lot of different disciplines. If we had more evidence-based diversity management, I think we would have a bright future.

[00:58:25.83] LARRY BOBO: Well, that’s great. That’s absolutely terrific. Well, let me thank you, Frank, for taking part in this discussion. I’ve learned a lot from reading the book. I recommend it very, very strongly to everyone, including those of us working in university settings, to learn what really does matter. So let me recommend to you all again, Getting to Diversity, What Works and What Doesn’t, by my colleague and friend Frank Dobbin and his co-author Alexandra Kalev. Thank you, Frank. This has been great.

[00:58:54.64] FRANK DOBBIN: Thanks so much for having me, Larry.

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