Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace: A Field Experiment on Who Cares and Why It Matters

Despite increasing attention and resources dedicated to workplace diversity and inclusion, much remains unknown and unquantified. This poses challenges to designing and evaluating policies and programs to effectively detect and address bias and systemic inequality in the workplace. Economist Jeffrey Flory and his colleagues will conduct a field experiment to examine the effects of workplace diversity and inclusivity on worker behavior and employee composition. The project will first evaluate how knowledge by applicants of a workplace’s level of diversity and inclusivity affects the types of applicants for a short-term job in terms of their productivity and demographic characteristics. The investigators will assess how experiencing various workplace attributes impacts worker behavior (productivity, accuracy, labor supply), independent from selection effects that occur at the application stage. The experiment will analyze data from work performed by 600 individuals hired for a short-term job, and the demographic attributes of all applicants for this job (expected N=10,000). The investigators will estimate the hiring stage treatment impacts on productivity characteristics for workers, the work-stage treatment impacts on work behavior, and the hiring-stage treatment impacts on demographic characteristics of applicants.