In Case You Haven't Heard…

Abstract

Companies that reveal their struggles to increase racial diversity in their workforces are perceived as trustworthy and committed to diversity compared with companies that remain silent, according to research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology. “Our research found that disclosing a lack of progress is a more effective way to signal that the company truly cares about diversity than suppressing this information,” Evan Apfelbaum, Ph.D., an associate professor of management and organizations at the Questrom School of Business at Boston University, stated in an American Psychological Association news release. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, many companies made public commitments to increase racial diversity within their workforces, but few of them have released diversity data about their employees. Approximately 95% of the largest companies in the United States haven't disclosed the diversity of their workforces to the public, according to previous research in 2021. “Companies' concerns about their reputation are legitimate, but our findings suggest that their intuition that transparency will harm their reputation may be incorrect and that the opposite may be true,” Apfelbaum said.