Why diversity matters to your tech company

Diversity efforts are most successful when they’re driven by a commitment from company leaders. And meaningful commitment requires leaders to understand why diversity matters.

Study after study in fields like organizational science, psychology and education indicate that diversity offers significant benefits for teams focused on creativity and innovation. According to Scott E. Page, professor of complex systems, political science and economics at the University of Michigan: “Diverse groups of people bring to organizations more and different ways of seeing a problem and, thus, faster/better ways of solving it.”

Diverse companies perform better

Given that diverse teams are smarter and more creative than homogeneous ones, it is unsurprising that a wealth of research shows a strong correlation between diverse organizations and positive financial outcomes. In a 2011 study of diversity in the top firms in Standard & Poor’s Composite 1500 list, researchers found “female representation in top management leads to an increase of $42 million in firm value.”

Diverse companies can better serve a diverse user base

When the employees of an organization better represent their users and desired users, they will build more effectively for those groups. When YouTube’s almost entirely right-handed developer team built the iOS app without considering how left-handed people would use it, for example, 5% to 10% of videos were uploaded upside down as a result. This factor may be especially relevant for leaders of consumer tech companies.

When Tracy Chou of Pinterest shared the company’s demographic information last year, she explained: “We only stand to improve the quality and impact of our products if the people building them are representative of the user base and reflect the same diversity of demography, culture, life experiences and interests that makes our community so vibrant.”

It’s the right thing to do

While diversity and inclusion efforts are most often driven by business rationales, we’ve spoken with a few CEOs who are motivated primarily by a belief that cultivating an inclusive tech community is simply the right thing to do.

Some of these leaders have noted that the tech industry is creating vast opportunity and that by excluding certain groups from that opportunity the industry is perpetuating and exacerbating existing social inequality. Others have emphasized a concern that by failing to involve particular communities in the process of creating of new technology, we as a society lose out on the benefits of those community members’ ideas.

For company leaders beginning to consider diversity and inclusion, understanding these rationales and identifying one that resonates for you and your organization can be a helpful first step.

But it’s only a first step. After deciding that diversity matters and articulating its importance, leaders must create a strategy for building a more diverse, inclusive company and an accountability plan to ensure that strategy is effective.