Workforce diversity: PC's final frontier? - political correctness - Demystifying Multiculturalism - Cover Story

National Review, Feb 21, 1994 by Frederick R. Lynch

IN RESEARCHING his new novel on sexual harassment, Michael Crichton was stunned to discover that none of the corporate executives he talked to was aware of the rising influence of feminism. When Crichton mentioned legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon, they scoffed that she was simply a "professor."

Ignoring ivory-tower ideological trends has cost business billions of dollars. Twenty years ago, the radical egalitarians of Political Correctness began the long march from the universities to the think tanks and the media, and on into social policy via the courts and government agencies. And now PC is in the White House.

PC long escaped serious criticism by manipulating white guilt and threatening potential critics as "racist." This ideology is built upon a colorized class struggle in which white males (formerly the "bourgeoisie") oppress women and minorities (formerly the "proletariat"), and lack of equal results in terms of either ethnicity or gender is primarily the result of deeply embedded racism and sexism. This world view, in turn, has produced a host of expensive policies to achieve proportional results, in everything from hiring to mortgage lending.

But things can always get worse. President Clinton's rhetoric about "workplace fairness" and his publicized efforts to build a government that "looks like America" signal the arrival of a new future-oriented proportionalism, known as "managing diversity." Diversity management leaves behind the bad press of a backward-looking, shrill affirmative action, and looks forward to an impending majority-minority America. It helps business harness this demographic destiny by exorcising the invisible demons of institutional racism/sexism and by cleansing white-male culture. Thus restructured, multicultural employers will retain and promote more minorities and women, gaining "the diversity advantage" in matching workforce ethnicity with an increasingly diverse customer base. "We've got to get right with the future!" commands Miami Herald publisher David Lawrence.

DIVERSITY management is more than a fad, yet less than an established field. It's a partly organized policy crusade with a mix of highly credentialed professionals, committed ideologues, curious CEOs and consultants, and employed and unemployed affirmative-action officers. Diversity consultants (most of whom are minority and/or female) offer a range of specialties from keynote speeches (stars fetch up to $10,000), to one-day mini-anthropology courses (for about $1,500 to $3,000), to long-term organizational makeovers (average: about $225,000).

Estimates vary widely, but about 30 to 50 per cent of major corporations and government agencies have some such programs on the books. Apple, Avon, Digital, DuPont, Hughes, and others have made workforce diversity an explicit corporate goal. Hughes has a Director of Diversity and U.S. West has a Director of Pluralism. Prudential Insurance is one of several corporations that link executives' performance evaluations (and/or bonuses) to their records on promoting female and minority employees. Some consultants urge corporations to follow the lead of major universities, such as Michigan and California, and use set-aside "targets of diversity" positions to increase workforce diversity.

Some of the issues that diversity management arose to address are real. There is heavy immigration into the United States. There are ethnic and gender tensions in the workplace. Employers in areas like Los Angeles and New York do face bewildering cultural variations among employees and customers. Cultures do contain taken-for-granted rules that can cause substantial frictions.

How do we deal with these changes? Who accommodates to whom? Should employees continue to assimilate into organizational cultures premised on Western values? Or should we "celebrate differences" and critique organizational cultures allegedly created by and for white males in order to make other people more comfortable?

Sondra Thiederman and Tom Kochman are fairly non-ideological PhD pros who offer sensible cross-cultural instruction about the thoughtways and habits of black, minority-immigrant, and female employees and customers. (They're careful to talk about diversity within cultural groups and not to create new stereotypes--an admitted problem in the diversity biz.)

But the more ambitious gurus of diversity management--such as Elsie Cross, R. Roosevelt Thomas (Beyond Race and Gender), and Ann Morrison (The Glass Ceiling, The New Leaders)--see assimilation as a cover for white male domination. Consultants' proposals for expensive "cultural audits" and subsequent changes in formal and informal rules and procedures are rooted in multiculturalism's axiom that there are no universal or objective standards. Therefore, all "qualifications" such as grades, test scores, and diplomas are suspect.

So distorted are the laws--not to mention the ideals--concerning non-discriminatory equal treatment that cynical CEOs do not blink when diversity consultants prescribe culturally adjusted "fair treatment" of employees rather than Eurocentric "equal treatment." For example, it might be unfair to evaluate equally white males and Asians on such criteria as "taking initiative" or "showing originality"; many Asians, it is held, are reluctant to challenge authority. (CEOs do wince, however, at diversity consultants' fondest dream: "managerial accountability"--tying performance evaluations and pay to achieving diversity goals.)