This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. HRD-0542132); Montana State University, Bozeman (MSU); Oregon State University (OSU), and University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, MSU, OSU, or UCSD.
Valuing Diversity
The purpose of this project is to explore an integrative framework for quantifying the net benefits of increasing diversity in the labor force, with a particular emphasis on the engineering disciplines. This framework can be used to conceptualize the opportunity cost in terms of changes in productivity that may occur as a result of restricting pools of human capital, and ultimately provide a solid, economically-driven rationale for assessing the benefits of additional resources allocated to programs designed to increase diversity in higher education, the academic ranks, and in corporate organizations.
Project Summary
Achieving diversity in the workforce remains a formative challenge, particularly in science, engineering and technology-related professions. The participation of women and minorities in these fields much lower than in the general population. Though the US is facing a shortage of scientists and engineers at a time when national security and environmental sustainability are garnering increased attention, organizations and academic programs related to these professions are slow to diversify.
The literature on the need for and benefits of diversity in both academics and industry is extensive, but almost without exception, lacks a systematic assessment of the economic value of increased diversity. The overall goal of this project is to advance the literature on the value of diversity for academic and corporate organizations, especially those related to science, engineering, and technology. Within that context, the purpose of this project is to design an economic based framework to quantify the net benefits of investing in diversity-promoting efforts.
The relative benefits of diversity have been highlighted in several presentations and commentaries, but no empirical analysis has tested these conjectures. The assumption is that greater diversity expands the pool of human capital for research and development, bringing together individuals with diverse backgrounds, assumptions, and problem-solving approaches, and spawns new directions in R&D with potentially broader social impacts. Diversity may also encourage a broader set of international linkages in R&D, with potentially larger international spillover effects.
We have three main objectives in this project:
- Develop an exploratory economic framework for assessing the economic and social net benefits and costs of greater diversity in the workforce.
- Provide a preliminary exploration of the nature and composition of a diversity metric that can be incorporated into that quantitative framework to value changes in diversity levels.
- To the extent possible provide some guidance as to the limitations and transferability of our results to a larger set of institutions; and provide recommendations to the administrators of diversity program efforts on an approach to assess the returns to investments in increasing diversity in the workforce.
We hope this project can provide researchers, administrators, and Human Resource personnel with the information necessary to access the returns on investments in diversity, and the opportunity costs of efforts regarding the participation of women and underrepresented minorities in the American workforce.