Diversity Dividend: The Transformational Power of Small Changes to Debias Your Company, Attract Diverse Talent, Manage Everyone Better-and Make More Money

From entry-level to the boardroom, what works to create large-scale change in organizations looking to accelerate their diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts and reap financial benefits.

Every leader endeavors to invest in and manage their key asset—talent—to be as high-performing as possible. Like a winning stock, successful diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actions pay back over time. That dividend is paid both to the company—through not only higher performance but also talent acquisition, training, and other savings—and to society in general. In Diversity Dividend, Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio offers a fresh, detailed look at how to realize gender and racial equity along the company-employee pathway—from attracting and interviewing applicants to onboarding, promoting, and sustaining hires—and how to remove systemic barriers at the organizational level that prevent women and underrepresented groups from advancing.

While other books have delved into DEI and the challenges inherent in sustaining successful efforts, no book has done so in concert with the depth and scope of data, basis in science, and application in the real world. In Diversity Dividend, Cecchi-Dimeglio artfully combines accessible anecdotal cases—where success was achieved or where, despite best intentions and efforts, things did not go as expected—with scientifically rigorous solutions as well as applications of data and big data.

As empowering as it is comprehensive, Diversity Dividend helps remove the guesswork and near-superstition that naturally arise when some methods work and others fail, thereby giving leaders the tools and insight to make informed choices at the right moments to create lasting change.

About the Author

Paola Cecchi-Dimeglio, PhD, LLM, MSc, JD, is a leading authority on helping senior leaders make more inclusive decisions for themselves and their organizations, having advised some of the largest for-profit and nonprofit companies in the world. An award-winning expert on behavioral and data science, big data and AI, race and gender, and leadership strategy, she holds dual appointments at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and Harvard Law School, where she serves as faculty chair of the Executive Leadership Research Initiative for Women and Minority Attorneys.