Episode 24: The Sources of Workplace Inequality: Prof. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey, UMass

Dr. Tomaskovic-Devey discusses what defines ’success’ around workplace equality — and tactics companies employ to achieve it.

Transcript

Chris Riback: I'm Chris Riback. This is Call In with Dr. Alexandria White. We discuss business leadership in our time of social change when to call in, when to call out, and how to build sustainable business value today.

Before our conversation though, an ask from us to you. We hope you like these call in conversations. And if so, we'd appreciate if you take a moment, go to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, and if you're so moved, leave a five-star review. The ratings really matter. They go a long way to helping other people find the podcast.

Dr. Alexandria White: Our show is brought to you by Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, which is committed to a more diverse and inclusive future. Let's call in.

Chris Riback: Professor Tomaskovic-Devey, thank you so much for joining us.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  It's my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Chris Riback: We have been looking forward to speaking with you. Maybe we could start at the highest level, and I would ask if you could provide some background on your research overall. It's unfair, of course, to ask you to sum up your life's work in a matter of minutes, but focus on the processes that generate workplace inequality. What are those processes? How long have they been in place, and why are they so hard to change?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: What a great question. So my background is I'm a social scientist. I direct the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, and I have a long history of working with research questions around, "Why are some workplaces more equal or less? Where do we see some kinds of advances around the DEI space?" Increasingly, I'm really interested in what works.

Where do we see the kind of positive outcomes? I spend a lot of time thinking about what management can do, and I'm hoping we can talk a little bit about that today.

Dr. Alexandria White: Well, we can start there. So what are the positive outcomes of that?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: In the DEI space, there's often attempts to change people, like change their attitudes or beliefs, or perhaps we believe that the people are good, but we have to make them aware of inequities, or biases or the like. I actually don't think that's the way managers manage workplaces. Managers don't say to workers, "Oh, please be in favor of productivity." Managers set goals, give people timetables, and then evaluate them for getting them done or not.

Managers count the things they care about. I think that in the DEI space, we see more of a paying attention to kind of the inputs on the level of kind of culture and talk, and less at the level of outputs and accountability. A manager who says everybody work harder but doesn't set a timetable for the product to hit the market is not managing.

Chris Riback: Your bio indicates that your long-term agenda is to, and I'm quoting here from it, is to work with others to move the social science of inequality to a more fully relational and organizational stance, which I think is a bit what you were just describing. As I was considering that and reading your work, and thinking about some of the things that you've written and said, I kept thinking about obstacles to success, and is there something about organizations interests that puts its interests, their interests in opposition to equality? How should equality get defined in the workplace?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: It's a really good question. So I think I don't see any opposition in the DEI space. There's potentially opposition sometimes in the kind of the space of who gets what. That is like once you've created a certain amount of value, you've got some revenue at the end of the quarter or the year, how it's distributed. That's probably not strongly correlated with the DEI space, and to the extent, it is ...

It probably isn't.

Chris Riback: Can I follow up on that? But the question of who gets what, maybe in some sense, that's where I'm wondering about conflicts of interest or tension.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: I'm hearing you now. If we think about organizations as relational spaces, that is people doing stuff with other people, and some of those relationships are hierarchical and some of them are competitive. Some of them may not actually be competitive in practice, but feel that way, and so these things do become part of the diversity and inclusion space when people with advantages feel threatened, and then you get pushback. What I've talked to diversity and inclusion leaders and big firms, they talk about the problem of middle managers. Middle managers just don't want to deal with this, right?

That's because middle managers have to deal with that sense of rat competition, resentment, scared, fear, whatever, but when I'm talking about management, I'm not actually talking about those middle managers. Middle manager's job is often to protect their work group from top managers. Top manager says, "I want this product out on time," or, "I want to restructure," and middle managers say, "No. Yes, it's fine. Do that, but not in my department."

That is their job, is to protect the local, but top managers long since have figured this out and they set goals. They said, "This is what I expect out of you," and those are metric-based goals, not kind of pie in the sky, let's be nice with each other.

Chris Riback: And so two follow-ups that come to mind on that, one is on metrics. Is that the right way to consider "Success," whatever success gets defined as, in DEI space within an organization, and then two, so I hear you: It's the role of senior management, of a CEO, but also other C-suite leaders, boards, to define and drive goals, to set the broad course. Yes, there may be then pushback, on whatever that goal is, from middle managers, but at the same time, senior management can't be unresponsive to middle management. They can't just ignore it, so two questions for you, Professor.

One is around measurements, metrics. Is that the right way to think about DEI, and two, what do you say to leaders, to C-suite leaders about that tension behind potential goals versus what they might be hearing from within the organization?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Two great questions. I'm going to do them in order, and if I forget the second one, get me back on track.

Chris Riback: We'll keep you on track, for sure.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  And so on the issue of metrics, each firm has needs really to look inside itself and say, "Okay, what are the metrics that matter for us?," so you can have a firm that's doing a good job hiring and has a terrible climate, so it ends up with a lot of turnover, right? You could have a firm that has good kind of diversity, let's say, in some set of target core jobs, but high wage gaps in between them because they've got some kind of informal pay raise system, or even a formal pay raise system that has biases in it, and so the idea of metrics is first, you have to figure out, "What's your problem?," and it's going to be different in different firms. For some firms, it's going to be a problem of hiring and some of turnover, some of inequitable treatment, some of climate. You have to figure that out. If you think about it, let's say you had a quality problem in a manufacturing firm, and you knew it by the final product, but that doesn't tell you what created the quality problem. You'd have to go back through the engineering process and the production process, and see where you made your mistakes.

This is not rocket science or unusual. This is what firms do all the time when they're figuring about their production process, time to market, various kinds of costs. My argument is they have to be similarly analytic and similarly metric-driven on the diversity and inclusion space. If they're not, it may just mean they don't value it.

Dr. Alexandria White: Okay. Well, taking all of that into account, metrics, hiring, accountability, I want to talk about the theory that might be behind that. So what is this relational inequality theory? How does that apply?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: It’s really a great question. It's a little bit of academic inside baseball, though.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes, yes.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: You know? The classic theory, academic theory, social science theory is about inequality, focus on the attributes of individuals.

Dr. Alexandria White: Okay.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: If you're underpaid, it's because that's your problem. There's something wrong with you as a person. If you don't ask-

Dr. Alexandria White: It’s your fault. Right.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  If you don't ask for a raise, it's your fault.

Dr. Alexandria White: It's your fault, okay.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  If you get paid a lot of money, it must be because you're really good at your job.

Dr. Alexandria White: And we know that's not true.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: And so often not true. So the explanation is in the individual, and my argument is that when we move into, well, organizational spaces, the explanations are always in the relationships. It's the relationships between people, it's relationships between jobs, the relationships between departments and the like. I'll get back to Chris' ... I could talk about that as inside baseball for hours, but we probably don't want to go too far down that road, but I'll go down it a little bit more, Alex. The power, for me, of the relational inequality theory is it moves this away from individuals to thinking about organizations.

Dr. Alexandria White: Okay. Yes.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  And organizations are really powerful precisely because that's where all the resources are. That's where the jobs are, that's where the income is, that's where the value added is. That's where a lot of the dynamism, that's where most of us get our status, prestige, respect, dignity, and all of those things, whether it's getting hired or getting paid or being treated with dignity, are about the relationships in those organizations. Who's valued, who's more powerful, who's treated with respect? And so for me, if you're going to tackle inequality problems, you have to tackle the relationships that produce them, and that also means changing the relationships.

Now, I'm going to go back to Chris' second question about, "Okay, the C-Suite people may get some resistance." Now. First, the C-Suite people do a lot of symbolic work to both towards their workers and towards their environment, so simply saying where we support diversity and inclusion initiatives doesn't actually mean they do. That is that this support can be symbolic, and just that-

Chris Riback: Does symbolism matter?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: It can matter if you put it into practice and you actually hold people accountable. I'll give an example from my research about that in a minute.

Chris Riback: Yes, please.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: But let's take the diversity and inclusion space right now. Then, in my mind, it has kind of two central actors that have access to the C-suite, and that's the diversity and inclusion manager, some of whom are now at the C-suite level the last few years, and the others, the lawyers. Whenever these issues arise, let's say someone feels they're being treated poorly, or perhaps the diversity and inclusion manager says, "Let's figure out why we've got all this turnover among black women." The lawyers are going to say, "Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. We may discover something that could be held against us in court," or there's a complaint, and the lawyers are going to say, "We have to isolate this person and get them out of here," so a lot of the legal talk around diversity and inclusion empowers the lawyers and it disempowers the diversity and inclusion managers. Right?

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: And so if you think about that in a relational kind of way, it's okay. If you want the C-Suite people to be more responsive, you have to empower the diversity, inclusion managers and not the lawyers, whose job reasonably is to defend the firm from threats, but if you define this as a threat, then the game's over.

Dr. Alexandria White: Yes. Do you have any examples of that? Any companies that come to mind?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  My strongest examples are negative, which is that the whole regulatory-

Dr. Alexandria White: Oh.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Well, which is that the whole regulatory structure around the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance, they're very legally structured. In that sense, the basic way as a society, we've decided to enforce equal opportunity, empowers the lawyers, and that's a mistake.

Chris Riback: But it sounds like an opportunity, perhaps if I'm interpreting what you're saying correctly, an opportunity to transform symbolism into action for a C-suite executive would be to shift some of the power base from legal to HR, DEI, and amplify that side. Is that an accurate?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  Yes, precisely, and I'll give two good examples of that. One is a historical example, and it comes from the researcher, Frank Dobbin, who you should also interview on this podcast, and so Frank's got a book on the kind of the history of diversity and inclusion, measures and how the personnel, which we now call human resource profession changed over time, called inventing ... I don't, you can look it up. Maybe it's called Inventing Equal Opportunity. But anyway, what Frank shows is that in the '60s, when we had this robust protest and civil rights action by African-Americans, and then following that, women's movement for women in general, that empowered the personnel managers.

It made them less bit players on the sideline, and the people that the CEOs would go to for help. His research, and then my research shows, we see very rapid gains in firms during this period, in terms of the hiring of all the researches about Black and white women and Black men, and very, very rapid gains that happened during this period. A more recent one is the Black Lives Matter Movement and the 2020 reaction to the murder of George Floyd, which led to gigantic protests, the largest protests ever in the history of the United States across the most cities, most geographic reach. It also led to many, many of the top corporations making public commitments to racial justice, and these are commitments, for many of these firms that had been pretty quiet before. For some of them, now here is where I'm supposed to tell you the name of firms, but I don't have it in front of me, but for some of them, these were quite dramatic, big dollar value, donations either to civil rights organizations or commitments to change their supply chain and the like.

One's a historical example and one's a contemporary example where the politics and the society empowered the diversity and inclusion people. I have talked to diversity and inclusion executives since the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter protests, and they agreed that their position in the firm was strengthened.

Chris Riback: What role can/should performance reviews play? Is that a type of tactic of where if a C-suite executive wants to really drive action, is this the type of thing that you see or that you advise companies to tie compensation to? Is this a hiring, retention, engagement, question? What are some kind of tactical, practical steps that leaders can take?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Right. So first, I see doing the work of figuring out what the right metrics are, and then following them over time is the primary tactic, and it's partly, it gives the person at the top an independent metric to say, "Yes, things are getting better or worse." It allows them to compare managers. So for example, if you say, okay, we're going to give raises to all the managers who increase the diversity of their work group, and they do it by hiring people from some other work group in the same firm, you've just reshuffled the checker board, and probably made one department worse while you've made another one better. One of the things that metrics do is allow you to kind of compare, and it also helps you figure out the excuses. I'd like to talk about the tech sector for a moment.

Dr. Alexandria White: Go ahead.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: We did some research early a few years ago and looking at all the largest firms in Silicon Valley, and so, okay, lots of money, lots of growth, kind of the jewel in the crown of the United States economy at the time, and also had a big diversity problem, and was painted as like a sector that just couldn't do it. Well, in that case, every manager can say, "Sorry, we have a diversity problem." We all do. Those people don't exist. We can't hire them, right?

We'd hire them if they existed, right? So that research, what we found was, "Oh, that's not really true." That some firms really were doing quite well, and some were doing horribly, and so that's a comparison across firms, right? I mean, and that is something, I think that we, as a society could do better. More recently, I've done some work on the tech sector, which is okay.

If we look at firms and say, "Okay, are they any of them getting better or are any of them getting worse?" What we found was, and about 10% of firms, there was a rapid increased diversity in their technical workers, in their managerial workers, and even in the executive level, but the executive level is the easiest place to increase diversity. It's often all you have to do is add one job, and it’s harder to do it for middle managers or for the, whatever, the core technical workforce. Anyway, so there were like 10% of firms that were getting better, and they tended to be firms that were more kind of dynamic, showed bigger, stronger growth trajectories. They also tended to be firms that had diversified their middle management, and then that had trickled down effects on the people they hired, which was the kind of core technical professional workforce.

Then, there's another group of firms almost as large that were just getting worse over time, but the average, something like 80% of the firms saw hardly any change. My set of feeling is, "Okay, that probably means that either that top 10% were actively managing it, diversity and doing it successfully, or they just got lucky," but I doubt it was that they just got lucky, and that's certainly not how we normally evaluate success.

Chris Riback: So is that a next step of research to determine, "Okay, if it was not just luck, literally, what were they doing immediately?"

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: I think that is the place to go. I did, I mentioned Frank Dobbin before. He and another sociologist, Alexandra Kalev have this new book, Getting to Diversity: What Works. That's a pretty good book. It's comparing across firms, so it doesn't get you that within straight to that recipe.

One of the things that they show is that the more that there are some kind of accountability metrics, the more progress you get, and diversity training doesn't have much of an effect, and actually, if you do diversity training, and you mentioned the law usually makes things worse, because it creates that threat for middle managers, so I think that, yes, I think that's a place to go, but I also think it's not just research that social scientists should be doing. It should be part of that kind of internal apparatus inside the firms, and big firms are going to have an operation research department, worrying about quality control, or DEI people should do this, be able to do the same.

Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you so much for that, Don, but I want to pivot before we close out. We know that companies, large companies are laying off people right now. We have to get your insight into that. So there's this expression, "How you lay off is who you lay off."

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Right.

Dr. Alexandria White: What does it mean to you?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Well, to me, it means that the layoff process could pay attention at all to what's the diversity implications of it, or it could be focusing on that, and that, "Okay, if you're going to have to lay off, let's say you're a firm that's made a big commitment in the last few years to diversity," and you've hired people you may not have hired five years ago, and then you lay off the most recently hired people, right? You just undone those goals that you'd set for yourself.

Dr. Alexandria White: You did. You did. Yes.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: One of the things I'm looking forward to, a lot of the big tech firms, in particular, 'cause this is where the layoffs are happening, it's not elsewhere, a lot of the big tech firms for the last few years have been releasing their reports to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, what's the composition of their labor force by race, gender, and occupation. Interesting to see after these big layoffs at like Microsoft and Google, what does numbers look like next year? We should be able, actually, to see from those reports, assuming they continue to release them, because the releases are voluntary, we should be able to see if when you chop off 5% of your workforce, who it was.

Chris Riback: On this point, my last question for you, are there specific tactics, notes that you give leaders as they do have to consider layoffs, how they can, things that they should be doing, keep in mind to make sure that they don't throw out diversity babies with the reduction in forest bathwater? I don't know if I got that metaphor exactly right, but-

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: I wish I was that influential, so nobody comes to me and asks, other than you, Chris.

Chris Riback: I just did. Yes.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey:  Thank you very much, Chris. I feel like my status has been elevated, but I think it gets back to that empowering the diversity and inclusion function within the firm. If you're going to make these layoff decisions, who's going to be at the table? And you need stakeholders who are going to advocate for diversity and inclusion, for D&I efforts to be successful. That also means when you're going to do something else that has major implications, whether it's changing the way you evaluate workers, or pay practices, or layoffs, those same stakeholders need to be empowered.

Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you. Don, this is about our time with ... This is the ending of our time together. Is there anything else that we left out that you might want to add for our listeners?

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: Okay, and I have one last sentence or something, so anybody who wants to see the kind of work we're doing, you can go to the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, and we have lots of data up there for you to look at, as well as a series of reports that it might be useful. Some of them are about these topics. We've also talked about discrimination around sexual harassment and pregnancy discrimination, and quite a lot more.

Chris Riback: We will put that in the show notes as well. Professor Tomaskovic-Devey, thank you so much for your time.

Dr. Alexandria White: Thank you so much for spending this time with us, sharing this space with us, and that is all for us today.

Dr. Donald Tomaskovic-Devey: My pleasure. Thank you all.