You may have noticed that the term “diversity” has vanished from corporate home pages and university mission statements, replaced by the less controversial language of “belonging” and “culture.” This vanishing act is, in part, a response to the fear of investigation, litigation or the withdrawal of federal grants, but it’s more fundamental than that. It reflects an uncomfortable tension that had been brewing well before President Trump took office a second time—a growing concern about how common actions that institutions take to increase diversity affect their ability to uphold a meritocracy, wherein the “best” candidates are selected.
A colleague serving on a strategic planning board at a major American university recently told me of an exchange with their president. During a meeting about a proposal to increase faculty diversity, the president of that university interjected, “Is diversity important to our institution? Yes. But we cannot sacrifice quality. We are not going to lower the bar.”
The proposal did not mention qualifications or changing standards. Yet, the words “increase diversity” tripped a psychological hairpin trigger, signaling that merit would be compromised. You may recognize this association. Phrases like “diversity hire” have come to mean a candidate lacks competence; the acronym “DEI” has been reappropriated to mean “didn’t earn it.” And a range of challenges from business leaders and beyond have called into question organizations’ DEI practices out of concern for their impact on a meritocracy.
My research, in collaboration with Eileen Suh and Yue Wu, suggests that this belief in a diversity-meritocracy trade-off—the idea that efforts to increase diversity undermine the chances of getting the “best” candidates—is surprisingly widespread in nationally representative surveys of everyday Americans and may be key to understanding political deadlock in this arena.
Let me offer a statement that should not be controversial, though it often feels that way in liberal circles: Merit matters. It is the bedrock of virtually every selection process in organizations. As my colleagues in management, psychology and sociology departments would be quick to point out, what a “meritocracy” means is a matter of debate. But we must acknowledge, at a basic level, that merit—skills, abilities and experience—matters quite a lot when it comes to selecting candidates. To borrow from philosopher Michael Sandel, think of how you’d go about selecting a surgeon for a loved one. If they must go under the knife to remove cancer, you’d want the most experienced and skillful surgeon, and not much else would matter.
But merit is not the only thing that matters, especially when it comes to the broader ecosystems of organizations and universities. Many also strive to diversify their student bodies and faculties for other reasons, including to right historic wrongs; to cultivate dynamic, multifaceted learning experiences that expose others to new perspectives and backgrounds; and to meet the demands of an increasingly global marketplace.
Our research, which includes nationally representative samples of more than 5,800 Americans, uses experiments to understand what people think the causal effect of introducing diversity-promoting actions is on the chances of getting the best candidates. We found that introducing even a single, commonplace diversity action decreases people’s belief that the selection process will be meritocratic. The results also showed that this belief was polarized politically. Conservatives were especially likely to believe in a diversity-meritocracy trade-off, and, somewhat surprisingly, moderates and even those who identified as slightly liberal believed this too, just to a lesser degree. It was only those who identified as liberal or very liberal who did not endorse this belief.
And we’re not talking about heavy-handed diversity actions like interview mandates (like the Rooney rule) or tying bonuses to hitting diversity numbers, practices that could reasonably pressure managers to compromise on candidate quality. In our research, we only present early-stage practices like efforts to expand the applicant pool that are not related to how candidates are evaluated.
This divide in beliefs about what diversity does to a meritocracy provides a powerful lens through which to understand our current deadlocked state. Organizations cannot figure out how to do both diversity and meritocracy in a way that satisfies everyday Americans across the political spectrum. Scrubbing websites of the term “diversity” in place of safer language or discreetly dropping diversity considerations from board selection criteria is like throwing an unassuming area rug over a deep, unseemly crack in the foundation. Presentable in passing, but the fault line is still very much there.
So, the million-dollar question is: Is it possible to devise a selection process that promotes diversity and upholds a meritocracy in the eyes of liberals and conservatives alike? We could eliminate the diversity actions and satisfy conservatives but irk liberals. Or we could include them and satisfy liberals but alienate conservatives. We’d have to pick a side. But in the process of collecting data from people across the country, we learned something unexpected about why liberals and conservatives diverge, which suggests a way out.
Past research in social and political psychology led us to expect that conservatives would be less supportive of diversity policies than liberals because they are more biased against minorities than liberals. Our data shows that, on average, conservatives hold more negative views of minority candidates’ competence than liberals, but we also found that differences in prejudice do not explain why conservatives believe there is a diversity-meritocracy trade-off and liberals do not. Our data instead point to fundamental differences in what liberals and conservatives think is fair in this arena.
Liberals’ view of fairness is one of corrective justice—a means to make a system that is currently unfair more just. Diversity-promoting actions are seen as a way to correct past injustices wherein underrepresented groups were excluded from, or otherwise disadvantaged in, selection processes. Conservatives view the current system of selection as already impartial and thus interpret the use of diversity-promoting actions as an unfair deviation from neutrality. Because of these conflicting fairness lenses, even early-stage outreach efforts—like recruiting at historically Black colleges—can trigger a collapse of trust.
However, it turns out that we can get liberals and conservatives to agree by changing the architecture of the selection process to address their respective fairness concerns. As one example, think of a two-stage selection process. In the first stage, organizations enlist a range of diversity-promoting actions like widening recruiting efforts, adjusting job ads to ensure that more people feel comfortable applying and raising awareness about bias. However, final selection decisions are then made blind to candidates’ demographic backgrounds—a clear signal that identity cannot influence who is selected.
In one of our most telling studies, we partnered with the office of admissions of a major U.S. business school. We surveyed more than 1,000 current M.B.A. students and alumni—the very people whose careers depend on the perceived value of their degree—about how to get the best candidates in the context of M.B.A. admissions. Half of them saw a description of their institution’s actual diversity efforts followed by a note indicating that their school would utilize “blind” evaluations to make final selection decisions. The other half (the control condition) viewed the same description of diversity efforts without the blinding practice. We then asked everyone whether they thought the process would be effective in getting the best possible candidates.
In the control condition, we observe starkly polarized views: A full 80 percent of liberal students and alumni believed the selection process would be effective, yet only 45 percent of conservatives did. In the blind evaluation condition, however, this gap shrunk markedly: 79 percent of liberals still thought the selection process would be effective, and now 66 percent of conservatives did, too. Liberals were OK with blind evaluations so long as they were preceded by good-faith efforts to advance diversity. Conservatives were OK with multiple early-stage diversity-promotion actions so long as they could trust that final decisions would not be influenced by identity. The majority of people in both groups did not view diversity and meritocracy as a trade-off.
Selection processes are the gatekeepers to organizations comprised of Americans across the political spectrum. It’s OK if people do not agree on which candidate is best if they accept the process as fair and legitimate. We shouldn’t treat diversity and meritocracy as if they are two ends of a seesaw. We can find ways to do both in a way that works for more people than you think.
Evan P. Apfelbaum is a professor of management and organizations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University. His research draws on social, organizational and developmental psychology to challenge conventional wisdom regarding how best to navigate differences.
