The Irrelevance of Race, Gender, and Height; The Importance of Diversity

I once worked with two soccer coaches. At one time, one had the most wins of any high school soccer coach in the country. The other has the record for the most college soccer victories in history. One was 5'7" and the other was 6'3".

Recently the president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, implied that women somehow don't have the same capacity for mathematics that men have. At the NBER Conference on Diversifying The Science & Engineering Workforce, he said, "One hypothesis for the very substantial disparity between men and women in high-end scientific professions is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end." Huh? How could a person at the head of an incredibly great university say something so incredibly dumb? Supposedly his comment was based on significant research, but it certainly resonates with me that he is stereotyping women and prejudging their capacity for success in certain roles.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the blockbuster success, The Tipping Point, has written an equally compelling book called, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. In this book, he explains that at a subconscious level there are a number of prejudices that are still alive and well. For example, he points out that while there are only 14% of men above six feet tall, there are 56% of CEOs who are above six feet tall. He went on to explain that in a number of psychological studies where the participants had to make snap decisions they associated black people with vastly more negative connotations than white people. On a personal level, he let his hair grow out significantly and noticed the dramatic impact that had on the number of times the police pulled him over while he was driving. At the end of the book, he explains how prejudices toward European men kept females and non-European men out of classical symphonies. However, when auditions were conducted using a screen where the evaluators could not see who was playing the music, the number of women hired as classical musicians went up five-fold and some Japanese men received positions they never held in the past.

Several years ago I heard a high school counselor say with a completely straight face that people whose last name began with the letters A-M were smarter than people whose last names started with N-Z. After I got done staring at her in amazement, I asked for her rationale. She said it was because teachers often put their students in alphabetical order, and then they tend to focus on the first two rows over the latter rows. Wow, that is such an extreme example of prejudice and stupidity it actually helps to show how dumb stereotypes really are.

If you are one of those people who think that only certain types of people can do certain jobs (i.e. only men can do operations, while women are better suited for "soft skills" such as human resources or marketing or public relations), let me give you three pieces of wisdom:

That game's over.

If you're living in that world, you're missing out on massive pools of talent for multiple functions within every organization.

In the past eight years, I've served as an Executive Coach for over 100 individuals. As a result, I've had the opportunity to observe over a thousand executives and managers in over 20 industries in real-life business situations. I've worked with both males and females who are African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Caucasian. I've worked with tall people and short people. I've spent over 3000 hours on-site observing these people in a wide array of scenarios and circumstances. If I could place each person through an Effectiveness X-Ray Machine, I would find common areas that generated extraordinary results and other common areas that led to terrible results. However, none of those characteristics would include race, gender, height, or, for that matter, personality type. I've simply seen too many examples of effective and ineffective individuals from each combination of race, gender, and height.

If you ignore my slice of experience, then look around you. There are examples of highly effective and ineffective people from every type of background in a wide array of industries and organizations and roles.

Carly Fiorina was recently fired as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard. Some people said she was fired because she is a woman. I don't think so. I think she was fired because she kept changing the organization's corporate strategy, and then she landed on a disastrous idea for a merger when she decided to merge Compaq and HP. Generally, when you put together two mediocre organizations you don't end up with a great organization. In addition, she couldn't get the organization to execute with anywhere near a high degree of efficiency. Contrast her performance with Anne Mulcahy at Xerox and Meg Whitman at eBay. Mulcahy has reorganized Xeros into a far more efficient machine that is steadily turning itself around. Whitman would be the CEO of The Walt Disney Company today if she wanted the job. It was Disney's enormous loss when she decided to stay at eBay and continue to build one of this century's most amazing companies.

I was a geometry teacher for a few years back in the early 90s. In geometry you start with a few definitions and then you build theorems off of those definitions. If you can find one exception to the theorem, then it invalidates the theorem. In real life, perhaps one exception doesn't tear down a belief, but a whole host of examples certainly does the job. There are way too many examples of effective executives and managers in every type of industry who according to past prejudices should never be in those positions to make sticking to age-old stereotypes a worthwhile activity.

Then the questions becomes "Why is it important to build diversity in your organization in terms of race, gender, culture, and life experiences?"

First, you greatly increase the pool of talent you can draw from. As Jim Collins, author of Good To Great, has become famous for saying, "The key to success is to get the right people on the bus, get the wrong people off of the bus, and put the right people in the right seats. Then they will figure out where to take the bus." The larger the pool of talent you draw from, the better your chances are of finding those right people. If you continue to consciously or subconsciously rule out people for certain jobs because of a superficial thing like their race, gender, height, or cultural background, then you have greatly diminished the pool of potential candidates for that job. In some ways, you lose out more than they do.

I used to be prejudiced toward computer floppy disks. I thought the only way you could back up computer files and transfer them from one computer to another was to put them on a floppy disk. Then I ordered a new desktop computer and found out it didn't come with a floppy disk option. I was paralyzed with fear. How was I going to save my files? I called for technical support and tried to plead my case. The technician said, "You could get a USB Flash Drive instead." I said, "I don't even know what that is, but I do know I need a floppy disk option." He said, "A USB Flash Drive is a fourth the size of a floppy disk, and can hold the equivalent of 30 or more floppy disks." Whoa. It hit me. I had prejudged the floppy disk and the USB and allowed my ignorance to define my backup capacity. Now I happily store all my stuff on one little ole USB. A person who is prejudiced toward certain types of people does the same thing I did. He reduces his organization's capacity for talent through his ignorance. Only until he sees his competitor blowing away his organization's productivity levels does he realize what he is missing out on. Is that really any different than the story of the Brooklyn Dodgers who first allowed African-Americans to play major league baseball? They suddenly had far greater pools of talent to draw from and almost immediately became perennial pennant contenders.

The second reason to drop those old-fashioned stereotypes is that a more diverse set of employees expands the organization's perspective. It's impossible for one person to have an understanding of every type of human experience, but you can broaden your organization's understanding of human experiences by expanding the type of people you hire. By broadening your organization's perspective of the marketplace, you can develop better solutions for a broader set of customers. And that is one of the keys to achieving significant, sustainable, and profitable growth.

In the end, prejudging a person's talent and capacity to succeed based on their race, gender, or height hurts your organization. Working to diversify your stable of talented employees helps your organization. It requires conscious effort to stop the former and accelerate the latter, but it will be well worth it.

Republishing Articles

Each month my e-newsletter gets republished in approximately 20 blogs, on-line publications, and internal publications for businesses, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. If you would like to republish all or part of my monthly articles, please send me an e-mail at dan@thecoughlincompany.com with "Republishing Article" in the subject heading. I will send you the article in a word document. All I ask is that you include my name as the author of the article and a short paragraph at the end of the article about me with a link to my website.

Take care and have a great month!

Dan Coughlin

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