DIVERSITY SPAWNS INNOVATION –BUT HOW CAN YOU MEASURE IT?

by David Braue

Tracking your DEI success can help you turn diversity into business results

Three years into its state-wide Plan for Gender Equality, there are already signs the Australian state of Western Australia’s decadal plan is paying dividends.

The project’s performance metrics have shown representation of women in key industries to be up across the board, including in traditionally maledominated sectors such as firefighting. And this year’s addition of Certificate IV in Information Technology (Cyber Security) training for women will build upon the success of the state’s Try a Trade program that gives school students a taste for careers in the building industry

By launching a wide range of initiatives to improve gender diversity across key areas of training, service delivery and career development, the state program –which will be repeated throughout the decade across four different action plans – shows how effective a broad commitment to equality can be.

At least, that’s what the numbers say.

Measuring the actual innovation that diversity enables, however, requires much more than simply counting the number of women: diversity, after all, is a multifaceted issue and companies have historically faced challenges in extending its benefits across the entire business.

It’s a challenge of which Roozan Zarifan, chief information officer with the Los Angeles County Department of Human Resources, was well aware when the county – the most populous in the United States, and the single largest employer in southern California – undertook a major data analytics project to improve the efficiency of hiring practices, of which ensuring diversity had long been a key goal.

Zarifan told the Data+AI Summit 2022 those practices were showing signs of strain. With nearly 353,000 job applications received for the more than 13,000 positions filled during the 2018/2019 fiscal year alone, it was taking an average of 327 days for applicants to secure their jobs, she said.

Working with Accenture, county data specialists began digging into applicants’ details and conducting high-level data analysis to produce quarterly hiring-related metrics that were fed back to the board of directors.

The project was also envisioned as a key tool to track the county’s progress towards diversity objectives by creating executive dashboards that would improve understanding of the broad spectrum of demographic, gender, cultural, educational, skills and other characteristics of the more than 100,000 workers holding roles across more than 1200 job classifications within its workforce.

“Hiring is a complex activity with many complicated factors,” Zarifan explained, “from the type of examination to number of exam hurdles, to job classifications and much more.”

“The business wanted to know which sourcing channel brought the best eligible candidates, and we wanted to gain insights about the candidates so that we can continue to attract and retain a diverse, talented workforce.”

After two months of data modelling and a five-month implementation, she said, “we’re able to see how efficient we are at each step of the process, where the candidates are coming from, which source yields the best candidates, and where we’re actually losing candidates.”

The dashboards also maintain the results of regular satisfaction surveys through which hiring managers and hired candidates can air their concerns or make suggestions about the work environment, diversity issues, or anything else that concerns them.

“Understanding or identifying hiring trends is pivotal to developing a hiring strategy,” she said, “and we now have access to this wealth of information through these dashboards.”

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS?

Quantifying people’s intrinsic attributes is always a fraught process, but as ever more progressive diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives tie diversity to conventional business metrics it has become a necessary challenge – if only so that the progress of diversity initiatives can be correlated with other business metrics like profit and productivity and, by extension, the less tangible metrics of innovation.

Yet, in large organisations focused on keeping the wheels turning, tracking gender diversity can be extremely complex – and difficult to correlate with innovation metrics.

Efforts to normalise this process have increasingly borne fruit, with the Washington DC-based Aspen Institute’s Tech Accountability Coalition (TAC) recently launching a comprehensive framework for defining, collecting and reporting on the performance of DEI initiatives.

Designed with input from over 100 tech leaders, experts and community advocates, the Institute’s new Equity Framework lays out a shared set of standards for businesses that Aspen Digital calls “a practical roadmap for industry-wide improvement [built on] common sense standards for how the industry defines terms, collects data and

The framework is structured to facilitate annual reports with actionable recommendations. It outlines five key actions for diversity advocates and business leaders to implement by July 1 – including establishing shared definitions, aligning equity standards for data collection, sharing anonymised aggregate data for benchmarking, determining opportunities for collective action, and shaping the TAC’s long-term vision and structure.

Data to be collected will include gender identity and racial representation of job applicants, interviews, hires, promotions, attrition, executive leadership, middle management, entry-level, and internship levels. 2022 workforce data will be used as the baseline.

Participating companies will also be expected to monitor the gender and racial makeup of tech, nontech, retail and manufacturing roles as well as fulltime, part-time and contingent workers.

Optional additional metrics may track individuals’ traits such as disability status, sexual orientation, gender identity, caregiver status, veteran status, socio-economic status and religion. Business metrics may also be tracked. These could be: the percentage of executives and managers with personal DEI objectives; supplier diversity; intern candidate diversity and conversion rate; product inclusion; and progression data around performance evaluation, compensation decisions, time to promotion, and succession planning.

In laying out a vocabulary for standardising the collection and reporting of demographic data, the TAC Equity Framework promises a standardised way of tying recruitment, employment and other metrics to DEI initiatives – enabling companies to track the actual performance of their DEI initiatives and tweak them to address lingering inequities.

Creating Drag On Innovation

By all accounts the persistence of those inequities continues to compromise companies’ ability to turn diversity into innovation, but many businesses do not fully understand the magnitude of their problems until they have a way to measure them.

The need for better metrics around gender diversity was a key recommendation of a recent RMIT University-Australian Women in Security Network (AWSN) collaborative report that found just 17 percent of Australia’s cybersecurity workers to be women. It suggested a range of remedies for businesses to lift women’s participation.

Many of the report’s 40 recommendations relate to measurable performance metrics. These included: conducting an internal gender pay gap audit to ensure equitable salary and benefits; collecting and analysing data on gender equity, diversity and inclusion; benchmarking the effectiveness of specific initiatives; including gender equity outcomes in the KPIs of executives and managers; and more.

Ultimately, it is hoped better monitoring of DEI initiatives will help businesses structure their operations to maximise innovation.

Getting to this point has historically proven difficult, but worthwhile. A recent Notre Dame University-NYUMichigan State University-Northwestern University meta analysis of more than 6.6 million published papers found that mixed-gender teams produce more novel and innovative work than single-gender teams.

The key to realising these benefits, notes UK-based CIO consultant Claire Priestley – former chief digital and information officer with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, and founder of diversity advocacy group CIO +1 – is to recognise the importance of “intersectionality and inclusion”.

“To me, that’s what it’s all about,” she said during a recent International Women’s Day event. “It’s about representation. It’s about inclusion.”

“It’s about making sure that businesses and organisations recognise that by not being entirely inclusive – by being representative but not necessarily inclusive – their products are going to be weaker, their bottom line will be weaker, and their leadership will be weaker as a result of it. This is just about sound business decisions.”

AMANDA-JANE TURNER

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