This month's Scientific American devotes twenty pages to articles on diversity
in science—the shameful lack thereof, and what can be done about it. One piece
is a kind of confessional by a Lockheed Martin engineer who quickly moved into
management and found that as she chose staff from widely varying backgrounds,
the quality of her group's work increased. Other articles cite social-science studies that show diverse
organizations are not only more socially just; they do better science and
engineering too. The reader of
these paeans to diversity could not be blamed for taking away the impression
that diversity is like goodness:
you simply can't have too much of it. Is that true?
Or are there limits to diversity?
What does diversity mean? It has both an objective aspect, and a
subjective or political aspect. In
the strict sense of diversity meaning merely "difference," one can
objectively measure diversity in genetic makeup, diversity in hair color, or
diversity in virtually any other measurable characteristic that a group of
things or people has. This
scientific aspect allows statisticians to crank out reams of charts showing the
degree of gender diversity in the number of Ph. D.'s granted, ethnic diversity
in hiring practices, and so on. So
in this scientific sense, diversity is a quantifiable, measurable thing.
But when we ask what kinds of
diversity are significant in the sense addressed by the Scientific American authors, the list narrows to political and
cultural hot-button matters:
gender, race, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and
so on. Scientists and engineers must
deal with these matters not as mythical objective professionals, but as human
beings. And in so doing, the issue
becomes an ethical, political, and even philosophical one.
The idea of virtue is not a
scientific concept, but it is one of the best ways to describe a certain class
of characteristics involving choice, as Aristotle says. I think Aristotle would class diversity
as a type of virtue because a diverse organization is better with regard to
social justice than a non-diverse one, and (as the social scientists have
shown), diverse scientific organizations do science and engineering better than
non-diverse ones. Making something
intrinsically good and also better at what it does are the two main aspects of
a virtue (again, according to Aristotle), and diversity qualifies on both
counts.
The next question is this: can you have too much diversity? Most virtues represent a mean or rough
average between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. Assembling a competent technical
organization with a mind to diversity represents a compromise between
extremes. In the decades before
diversity in its modern sense was recognized as an organizational goal, those
in charge (usually white males) picked the best people they could while
following the cultural norms of their time. These norms generally (but not always) excluded women and
minorities, and tended to perpetuate the demographic makeup of the organization,
while making it extremely hard or impossible for non-whites and non-males to
enter. This was bad.
However, you can imagine an
opposite extreme. The perfectly
diverse organization would have diversity statistics identical to those of the
largest applicable sample group:
the state, the nation, or even the world. William F. Buckley is supposed to have said he'd rather be
governed by the first hundred names in the Boston phone book than by the entire
faculty of Harvard University, and in this proposal, at least, he was favoring
the opposite extreme of diversity I am talking about. But if diversity is the only
criterion of selection, the specialized competencies that a research or
engineering organization needs will be absent, except by chance, and it will
fail to achieve its objective, unless its only objective is to show that it is
acceptably diverse.
The U. S. National Science
Foundation has in recent years spent a substantial portion of its resources
encouraging diversity in various ways.
To the extent that these efforts have righted previous injustices
committed either consciously or through unconscious bias against certain
groups, they are to be applauded.
But there is nothing scientific about the choices of which measures of
diversity to work on.
In a secular democracy, these
choices are made politically. And
making politics your ultimate authority can land you in unpleasant places, as
scientists in Russia and Germany have found. A crackpot biologist named Lysenko got his hands on the
political levers of control in the old USSR in the 1920s. Lysenko thought
acquired characteristics could be inherited, and for the next forty years, any Soviet
biologist who disagreed with Lysenko about evolution was liable to disappear
into the Siberian work camps. And
the Nazi party in Germany took delight in calling Einstein's theory of
relativity "Jewish physics."
Such blatant overruling of science by politics can always happen if
those in charge value political goals more than the integrity of science.
I am personally about as
un-diverse as you can get: an old white male conservative Christian Texan. An organization composed of people like
me would score close to zero on any diversity index you care to name. I view the diversity project as an
attempt, however flawed, to show the type of love that wills the good of the
beloved to people who would otherwise be kept from flourishing to the best of
their abilities. There is nothing
wrong with this type of love. It
is the type of love Jesus Christ exhorted his followers to show to each
other. But implementing diversity
in a way that helps those who need that type of help without inflicting harm or
the loss of opportunity on others is an inherently complex task. The only way to do it perfectly would
be to have perfect insight into the problem of social justice, and only God has
that. Any human attempt at
diversity represents a compromise between using resources to increase diversity,
versus using resources to address the task at hand. And those promoting diversity should remember that it is
possible to have too much of a good thing.