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essweek
May 14, 2018
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are particularly strong when internal diversity includes
people who represent a company’s customers.
The most popular explanation is diversity in itself
improves management. The idea is that men and women, or
people of diferent races, see the world in diferent ways, and
diversity of perspective leads to less groupthink and better
decision-making. Maybe Amazon should think of it in another
way. What if those companies have achieved better results
because their hiring process is better? And what if, by strip-
ping out a bias that favors white men, they’re truly able to
identify the candidates’ talent, skill, and acumen?
It wouldn’t be the irst time that what we thought we knew
about talent turned out to be false. For a century, baseball
scouts identiied prospective major leaguers through careful,
personal observation—a process that turned out to be full of
misconceptions and bias. When Billy Beane of
Moneyball
fame
found a more reliable way to evaluate players, he turned a
small-market team into one of the best in baseball. He also fun-
damentally changed the sport’s market for talent.
In the world of classical music, the proportion of women in
professional orchestras jumped to 25 percent from 5 percent in
the 1970s and 1980s, but only after most orchestras instituted a
“gender blind” audition process that shielded musicians from
the jury with a screen. “The best thing that companies can
do is to throw out their intuition that they know whom to
hire and what to look for,” says Catherine Tinsley, the Raini
Family Professor of Management at Georgetown University.
“If you see gender diferences in placement, then you should
irst be asking if there is something about the context or the
environment that is positioning men and women diferently.”
The suggestion that Amazon has a talent problem may
sound ridiculous. It’s one of the world’s most valuable com-
panies and, according to Glassdoor, some 2.5 million people
researched employment at Amazon in the most recent month,
making it one of the site’s most intriguing employers. (Only
1.7 million looked for information about working at Google.) By
most metrics, Amazon ain’t broke, so there’s no reason to ix it.
At the same time, it’s hard to imagine what might have
been—or still could be—if the decision-makers at Amazon
included more women and people of color. It’s a company
deined by its boundless ambition. If diversity in the work-
force creates a more powerful, interesting, and innovative
Amazon—well, good luck to the rest of us.
Amazon is sensitive to this. In the pageantry of choosing a
city for HQ2, it has been looking at gender and racial diversity
in the workforce, according to people close to the process. Its
executives have also met with local public school oicials to
gauge interest in possible partnerships in science, technology,
engineering, and mathematics (STEM) ields. They’re thinking
about who’s in their hiring pipeline, now and in the future.
If that’s the case, Amazon should build HQ2 in Chicago. Or
Toronto, or Washington, D.C. We looked at the demographics
of the workforce, and among the 20 metro areas on the
company’s short list, these are the only ones that are above
average on three relevant measures of diversity: percent-
age of people of color in the workforce, female-to-male ratio
among programmers, and overall female participation in
the workforce. (For those trying to handicap, Toronto,