Why diversity in the workplace matters
One of the great pleasures of working in high tech is the opportunity to meet people who are different from yourself. When I started working in Bell Northern Research in 1985, the thing that struck me immediately was the diversity of my new team. My first mentor was a Jewish French Canadian woman. My immediate team included iron-curtain refugees from Hungary and Poland. My manager was from Chile. There were also some Anglo-Saxon Canadians like me.
Every team I've worked in since has been an interesting blend of people from many different backgrounds. This is nearly universal in high tech, and one of its strengths.
I try to learn something from everyone I meet if I can. There are a few people whose minds are so trapped in ignorance that this is nearly impossible, but they are rare.
If you think about it, the only people you can't learn from are people exactly like you. There is little opportunity to learn from someone with the same background, education, and assumptions as you have. They probably think exactly like you. Reinforcing existing knowledge and ideas can sometimes be useful, but there is far more value in learning new things.
In high tech, we are exposed to diverse ideas because they are brought to the discussion by diverse people. The fact that technology is "knowledge work" means that these people are usually both well educated and intelligent. The environment is usually one where ideas are discussed and evaluated on their intrinsic merit. For anyone interested in improving themselves, this is ideal.
Group-think arises when most of the people in a team are too similar, or the team is too static. Adding new team members who are full of different ideas is the easiest solution. The most junior person may add the most value to the team if they are different.
Making the team diverse cannot be the primary goal when hiring. You always need to hire the best candidate. However, if you do not have a diverse team, you should examine your hiring practices for bias. If you're really hiring the best people, and you do not have discriminatory hiring, your team will almost always be diverse.
I am blessed to have had the acquaintance and friendship of people from many backgrounds. I have met wonderful people and jerks. I have met geniuses and idiots. I have seen no correlation between people's background and their value.
I have learned to treat everyone as an individual, not as a member of a category. Generalizations can be useful, but not when judging individuals.
If you're lucky, after being exposed to the broad spectrum of humanity, you learn tolerance and understanding. We can bring this lesson out into our community and strengthen the fabric of society. There is no reason that compassion and basic courtesy should be constrained by artificial boundaries of ethnicity, religion, gender, or any other variant of human expression. What is the value of hate?
This is the great hope for a better future for the human race. Tolerance defeats ignorance in the long run. History shows it repeatedly. We are winning.