The Drama Around Diversity Quotas

Germany’s politicians have agreed on a quota for the board of public companies. Stern.de published videos of a range of successful women calling themselves “quota women”, along with a range of messages about their personal backgrounds. Some highlighted that quotas helped them to get ahead in life, while others shared that they persevered without quotas, and how hard that has been. 

The success of Ugur Sahin and Izken Tureci in finding a vaccine against the corona virus makes one thing perfectly clear: Germany’s future is tied to talent pools we still suck at tapping into: women and immigrants. While fewer and fewer people are seeing diversity as the stuff of charities, rather than equity-driven performance, the eternal question lies in how we can solve the problem of diverse talent (based on gender, ethnicity, social class, able-bodiedness) still struggling to find representation in our society, from politics, to culture and business. Waiting for hundreds of years and some type of change that no one can quite put their finger on is more than dissatisfying - not just to me personally, but to the progress we owe the world we live in. Think of the many opportunities we could unlock if we tap into the most promising minds and doers, rather than continuing to disregard vast pools of talent in the world. 

So…people demanded quotas. Many women demanded quotas. Some men demanded quotas. The backlash and praise that women who stood up for the quota have seen shows how hotly debated this topic still is, finding proponents and opponents among non-diverse and diverse groups of people alike. 

I have thought about the question of whether or not I support quotas long and hard and the path to my opinion has been far from linear. 

I was strongly against quotas. I came from the perspective of somebody who worked incredibly hard, yet often felt I had to justify my seat at the table because people perceived it not to be based on my performance, but rather on the fact that I am a woman of colour. When years ago somebody in my scholarship for gifted students said to me “well, it’s clear why you’re here” (and he was referring to my gender/skin colour), I wanted to shove my study results, the fact that I was valedictorian in an anonymised grading system, right in his face. I wanted to make it clear, once and for all, that I was there because I was smart and studied hard, not because of my background. I hence thought that quotas would rather harm than benefit diverse talent because our background, rather than our achievements, would become the determining factor in how we’re perceived. 

I now realise this thinking was naive. I was wrong on two accounts: 

I assumed that the whole world could be measured transparently and on a universal scale - like your grades are in school. 

I further assumed it was just to measure everyone on the same universal scale of performance to judge their innate abilities and how far they could go in life.

I now understand that in reality:

1) The scale we use for measurement sucks. It isn’t reliable.

The world is neither measured transparently nor reliably. Depending on just a few signals, people are perceived differently. Numerous studies show that CVs with different surnames (one sounding like a native; one like an immigrant) produce different outcomes in perceived strength of a candidate. There are many more such examples. There is no reliable scale for performance, but rather a crooked, holey one that overemphasises some signals, and lets many others pass through like a sieve. It’s often not performance that counts, but our perception of that performance. This perception is heavily biased by signals we have been taught - actively and passively - our whole life. Put into research terms - the reliability of our performance measurement is flawed. 

2) Even if we could measure perfectly: what does it matter when people start from different places? Our current measurement of success isn’t valid. 

Performance is a concept that feeds off a multitude of parameters, and we need to take into consideration the starting point to understand the end point. Let’s take high jump as an example: If one person jumps from below ground level, and the other from a fat socket, then the height of the bar you can jump over says nothing about how good of a jumper you are. Yet we’re using “the height of the bar you jumped over” as a measurement for success, but there is little validity in this measurement - it doesn’t actually measure your ability to jump. Your current leadership position often says little about how good of a leader you are. The amount of money in many people’s bank accounts says little about how hard working / entrepreneurial they are. The list goes on.

On top of this, we live in a fast-changing world in which “success” arguably becomes more and more about adaptability, grit, empathy, curiosity, and drive. I would argue that we need to take a more holistic approach in determining the value of people (how good you will be at a given job) that goes beyond the number of years experience in a very narrowly defined field, or the fact that you went to such and such university, or belong to this and that club. We need to wake up to the drastic and fast change we are witnessing and understand that what made us successful 30 years ago won’t make us successful in 30 years from now.

3) The rate of progress is the most important determinant for future success.

We need to find ways of assessing capabilities in the entirety of factors that determine how far somebody has come, how talented the are, and where they can still go in life. The one thing that remains true is that learning compounds. If we invest in those who learn fast and progress, we’re setting the world up for success. Let’s measure how much people are learning, how strongly they’re developing, to determine where they can go in life, rather than only looking at where they are right now and ignoring their starting points. Let’s stop focusing so obsessively on some marker that we were taught separates the good from the bad. 

This is clearly the harder thing to do though. How the hell should we assess people’s starting points when it is so much easier to just look at the bar they’re jumping over right now? But it is the right thing to do - not just morally, but to generate the strongest outcomes. Harder things will only happen with the right incentives. Quotas will force us to take a more nuanced perspective and abandon established measurement tools because they will force us to move away from a very simplistic thinking about performance to one that considers the starting point, and what that means for where people can eventually end up in life. Quotas won’t bring us more of the bad, but help us to re-balance our view of quality, and therefore allow us to foster more of the good. 

While I now agree that we need quotas to measure talent and quality more precisely, I personally don’t like the messaging of “quota woman” because I think it draws attention to a flawed perception of why women are successful. Nevertheless, I have huge respect for the courage the women associated with the article showed. They are incredibly strong women, and it is time we are all pushed to acknowledge this through quotas.