7. Diversity and Inclusion

Workplace diversity suggests that employees and managers, as well as suppliers, clients and customers, are different in several ways, including, inter alia, their gender, race, age, ethnicity, health, disability, sexual orientation, nationality, language, religion, caring responsibilities, education and previous career experience. The composition of the workforce, the pool of potential job applicants and the diversity of the workplace are changing. In the last two years, the Covid-19 pandemic has reduced the participation of both older workers and women in the workforce (Stevenson, 2021), but longer-term trends suggest that the workforce will become increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, age, religion, culture, nationality and language. At the same time, technological advances beyond automation, such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, and social media, have significantly permeated both our work and non-work lives, and these changes have the potential to accelerate the diversification of the workforce. Consequently, workforces and many workplaces across the globe no longer have a dominant, traditional or homogenous pool of workers, nor do they have universal structures or approaches to work and working time.

This increasing workplace diversity has implications for many aspects of the Future of Work in organisations, starting with the way that work is organised. In particular, the combination of human and non-human interactions and job/occupational task redistributions is likely to change over time, based upon yet-to-be articulated criteria of what humans/non-human can perform best. Technological changes have significant potential to change outcomes such as organisational profits, worker health, and the nature of human-based jobs and non-human centred work, influencing the relative balance of worker and organisational influences on these outcomes (Ozkazanc-Pan, 2021). To develop and maintain the sustainability of organisations for human workers, organisational decision-makers need to structure work systems, practices, emerging technology and the cultures of organisations, to adapt to this changing environment.

In this chapter, we focus upon the future of workplace diversity and inclusion of human workers, as well as how diversity and inclusion are likely to be affected by developments in technology (e.g., AI and non-human presence at work). Our discussion here centres on an understanding of diversity through a multi-level lens as a strategy for moving considerations of diversity and inclusion towards a broader framework for the future. Included in this is the multi-level lens is a recognition of the increasingly important role of technology and AI at all levels of workplace diversity and inclusion.

Human and non-human diversity is a nuanced and complex topic. Our examples throughout the chapter focus largely on gender, race and age issues, since we know that people automatically evaluate other people, at least in the first instance, along these three dimensions of diversity (Nelson, 2004). We will argue that developments in technology are likely to have an impact on how organisations react to the increasing diversity of the workforce and that they have the potential to either enhance or impede diversity and inclusion. Finally, we consider the implications of increasing diversity for organisations, with a focus on interventions and policies that might promote a more diverse, inclusive and indeed, sustainable workplace in the years ahead. We thus expect our chapter to generate reflective and critical discussions about the future of workplace diversity and inclusion.

Often, theories of bias and prejudice, as well as programmes and interventions for reducing bias at work (e.g., unconscious bias training), assume that some subset of individuals hold negative views or stereotypes about people who are different from them, and more positive views about people who they view as similar. Generalised beliefs individuals have about members of specific groups in society are usually labelled as stereotypes, and these beliefs underlie much of the past research on diversity and inclusion. Stereotypes represent a “relatively simple cognition, especially of a social group” (Krech et al., 1962, p. 67), which is exaggerated in two important ways (Allport, 1954). First, all members of that group are seen as sharing a set of attributes, and second, beliefs or knowledge about these group attributes are used to make judgements about individuals. Prejudice encompasses an overall emotional feeling concerning an individual or group (Berkowitz, 2000), and these beliefs and feelings are thought to drive behaviours and actions towards these individuals or groups (Fazio, 1986, 1995). That is, individuals express their attitudes by means of holding certain beliefs about an individual or group (stereotypes), feeling a certain way about an individual or group (prejudice) and intending to behave in a certain way towards an individual or group (discrimination).

While individual beliefs and beliefs shared among group members are an important component of bias, prejudice and discrimination, these beliefs and assumptions can become institutionalised, and their effects can continue to be felt long after the individuals whose beliefs created these institutional norms, rules, regulations and laws have passed from the scene. It is therefore useful to consider both individual-group level explanations for bias, prejudice and discrimination and institutional explanations.

Individual and Group-Level Explanations. Stereotypes reflect people’s consensual beliefs about groups of people including beliefs about the physical, personality and social characteristics of women and men, ethnic groups, age and generational groups, religions and so forth. By observing a given behaviour, an observer infers that the person possesses a given trait or characteristic. For example, one might observe a woman comforting a baby or an elderly person. An inference is made that women are nurturing and gentle. Further, these traits may be seen as stable across all members of that group with little variability: all women are nurturing or gentle. The study of group stereotypes emerged in psychology and sociological research on social role theory (Eagly, 1997). Social role theory has its origins in efforts to understand the perceptions of gender behaviour. Empirical findings have suggested that there is a wide variation in perceptions of gender differences and similarities across contexts (Eagly, 1987, 1997), but also suggest that perceivers have complex yet relatively stable sets of beliefs and associations concerning men and women (Eagly, 1997; Bosak et al., 2012).

For example, Eagly and Steffen’s (1984) seminal work established that gender stereotypes can be explained by a consideration of women’s and men’s occupational roles. Men are often viewed in the role of “breadwinner” (or the employee of higher status), while women are often viewed in the role of homemaker (or employee of lower status). Women are therefore disproportionately represented in roles requiring communal traits, for example “concerned for the welfare of others” (Deaux & Kite, 1993, p. 113). Men are disproportionately represented in roles requiring agentic traits, for example assertiveness (Eagly, 1997). Observing women and men in these occupational roles leads people to associate the characteristics of these roles with the individuals who occupy them; therefore, people conclude that women are typically communal and men are typically agentic (Eagly & Steffen, 1984). Further, women may be directed largely towards these jobs rather than occupations that are associated with other traits or characteristics that may be associated with men (Acker, 1990), creating and reinforcing occupational sex segregation of jobs. This segregation of occupations by gender, race or age reinforces other’s perceptions that some jobs are more suited for individuals based on their gender, race and age rather than based on job-related skills, knowledge or characteristics.

Individual-level explanations of bias and discrimination endure for a number of reasons. Most people can agree there are stereotypes and discrimination that can create barriers to diversity and inclusion. We can usually “see” or observe bias at an individual or even group level. For example, we might observe instances where one employee is treated differently from others, perhaps because of their gender or race. We might also track group differences in outcomes by recording decisions such as hiring, promotions or pay increases for individuals from diverse groups compared to a majority group. If we observe differences in the ways individuals or groups are treated in the workplace, we are likely to search for explanations that involve familiar concepts such as stereotypes, prejudice or discrimination. For example, when an employee habitually arrives late to virtual meetings, we may attribute this to individual factors (e.g., stereotype that person as lazy or undependable) or to group/demographic factors (e.g., stereotype that person as coming from a culture that does not place an emphasis on timeliness).

As we move to more organisational and institutional explanations, there is less agreement on discriminatory behaviours and practices as they are more difficult to clearly articulate or “see”, often because such things are accepted as “normal”. That is, we have built an entire series of institutions (e.g., legal systems, corporations) around the experience of the past several centuries, when work was largely the domain of one small subset of the population (generally, male members of the dominant racial/ethnic groups), and these institutions can often create subtle but powerful barriers to diversity and inclusion. These individual and group-level explanations for bias and discrimination are useful but insufficient; if we ignore broader societal factors, we are likely to arrive at a limited understanding of why diversity continues to be a challenge in work and organisations. One of the arguments in this chapter is that we must also consider structural and institutional factors. Returning to the example above that an individual is consistently late to virtual meetings, rather than applying a person-centred attribution or stereotype (e.g., person is lazy), it may be that this individual lives in a rural location that has slow internet connectivity. Our stereotype of laziness to the attributes of the individual (and in other instances, the attributes of groups) may mislead us if we ignore broader structural barriers to arriving on time to a virtual meeting.

Institutional-Level Explanations for Bias and Discrimination. There is a growing body of scholarship that examines phenomena such as racism and sexism (e.g., Acker, 2006) as a feature of organisations rather than simply the product of individual stereotypes and decisions. For example, Ray (2019) proposes that organisations are racial structures connecting organisational rules to social and material resources. Racial hierarchies in organisations enhance or diminish the agency of racial groups, legitimate the unequal distribution of resources and establish a set of norms for desired behaviours (e.g., whiteness is treated as a credential). More generally, organisations create norms and hierarchies that both put some people in advantaged positions (e.g., white middle-aged males) and that serve to justify those hierarchies by defining what is normal and expected (Acker, 1990, 2006). Thus, our beliefs about and perceptions of work and workers include “[…] a host of general organisational patterns, including gendered hierarchies, the division between paid work and unpaid housework, and the distinction between production and reproduction” (Ray, 2019, p. 32).

Diversity scholars (e.g., Davis, 1983) argue that many forms of racism and sexism can be best understood as ways of rationalising and naturalising existing racial and gender-based hierarchies. That is, the fact that work, especially work that involves power and status, has traditionally been the exclusive preserve of a subset of male workers, creates a norm that suggests to many that it should be the preserve of that subset and that workers from other strata of society should not strive for or occupy these positions. Still others (Bowser, 2017) stress that any adequate theory of racism (or sexism, ageism—authors’ addition) should include cultural, institutional and personal factors. For example, proponents of Critical Race Theory argue that racism is often embedded in and codified in social and legal structures (e.g., discriminatory practices in giving access to home ownership) that have the effect of maintaining existing racial hierarchies (George, 2021).

Beliefs about who should hold different types of jobs, positions or power, control over resources, etc., develop over time, and these do not necessarily require individual animus towards members of disadvantaged groups. Rather, these beliefs represent a set of assumptions about what is “normal”, and they often lag rather than lead changes in society. This does suggest, however, that over time as the workforce changes, jobs that had traditionally been seen as reserved for one group of people (often, white middle-aged males) may in the future be seen as more open to a more diverse set of individuals.

As technology starts to change the nature of work and the skills required for work, it is possible that there will be changes in the content of stereotypes and their effects on workers and organisations. Age discrimination, for example, might increase, as jobs require the use of more complex technologies. There is evidence, for example, that older workers are seen as having more difficulty learning and adjusting to new technologies (Parry & McCarthy, 2017). Discrimination based on ethnicity, education or race, however, might decrease as technology takes over some of the skills once required. Delivery truck drivers, for example, once were required to make decisions about their routes, the order in which to serve customers and the way their vans were loaded, but many of these decisions now reside in route-planning software, arguably lowering the skill levels required of drivers (Kaiser-Schatzlein, 2022).

Organisations often find it difficult to provide an inclusive work environment that gives a diverse workforce an opportunity to succeed, in large part because they were often built by and for a very different (more homogeneous) workforce. Individual-level theories of prejudice and discrimination (e.g., social role theory) are useful, but it is necessary to consider how organisational norms and cultures create barriers for a diverse workforce. The criteria that have traditionally defined individual and organisational success (e.g., profit, competition, advancement) also tend to support a particular pattern of hierarchy and advantage that may have been functional when the workforce was largely homogeneous and when discrimination was broadly accepted in society. As the workforce becomes more diverse, as people, and more specifically organisational decision-makers, become more aware of detrimental discriminatory attitudes and behaviour, and as technology radically transforms the nature of work, organisations have an opportunity to rethink their definition of what represents success and what individuals should do to help organisations succeed.

Technological developments now, and into the future, will have an impact on how organisations manage the increasing diversity of the workforce and the way in which work is organised. Organisations must provide an inclusive work environment that gives a diverse workforce an opportunity to succeed. To do this, it is necessary to consider how both nascent stereotypes and overt discrimination among organisational decision-makers can be reduced, and how barriers related to organisational norms and cultures can be deconstructed in the face of a new wave of employees with diverse needs, demands and values. New technologies offer many opportunities and possibilities in the reduction of decision-making bias, particularly within the many work structures, systems and practices that have so often been the cause of workplace prejudice.