Workplace Backlash? Workforce Diversity and Dominant Group Attraction to Pro-Diversity Claims

Abstract

Amidst growing workforce diversity, firms increasingly make pro-diversity claims when recruiting. This paper examines whether, for workers from historically dominant groups, perceptions of growing workforce diversity decrease attraction to firms that make pro-diversity claims. In a pre-registered survey experiment, approximately 3,000 white Americans were most attracted to a non-discrimination claim and more attracted to a pro-diversity claim than a company description that made no mention of diversity. Among non-bachelor's-holding subjects, information illustrating growing workforce diversity significantly decreased attraction to the pro-diversity claim. These findings demonstrate one way in which the well-documented relationship between growing diversity and increasingly exclusionary political preferences extends to workplace preferences. They imply that firms reliant on non-bachelor's-holding white workers may face an increasingly stark trade-off between using worker-of-color-attracting pro-diversity claims or white-worker-attracting non-discrimination claims. I discuss the strategic challenges created by far-reaching shifts in workplace preferences as well as the under-acknowledged role of human capital strategy in shaping the broader social environment.