The Nature of Public Criticism Against Corporate Efforts to Diversify

Prominent criticisms of corporate diversity efforts articulated by academics, activists, and political commentators center on concerns regarding how corporations assign value to workers for their contribution to diversity. One broad criticism is that corporations value marginalized workers—racially minoritized workers, women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized groups—too much in their pursuit of diversity (“diversity overreach”). An alternative criticism is that corporations value a broad range of backgrounds and experiences, and in doing so, value marginalized workers too little (“diversity dilution”). Yet it is unclear how these two views coexist among the general public. In this paper, we make headway on this question by first conceptualizing the evaluative core of each criticism as a discrepancy between two judgements: beliefs about how corporations value particular workers for their contribution to diversity and one’s personal assessments of the workers’ value for diversity. When these two assessments diverge, corporations are perceived as valuing particular workers too much or too little—a discrepancy we refer to as perceived corporate misvaluation. This conceptualization allows us to empirically distinguish between either broad criticism and determine the extent to which either characterizes public criticism. Drawing on a conjoint survey experiment with a quota-based sample of U.S. adults in which respondents evaluate fictitious workers, we find that public criticism combines elements of the two accounts in unexpected ways—and that the nature of criticism depends on one’s political orientation. This project sheds light on the underpinnings of the fraught dynamics surrounding corporate diversity today.