A Deep Dive into DEI: Research, Interventions, and Alternatives
June 9, 2021
On June 9th at 7pm Eastern, our panelists – Edward Chang, Frank Dobbin, and Garrett Johnson – tackled the issue of training programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in a wide range of organizations and settings. They drew from their collective experience in industry and academia to address questions around DEI programming effectiveness, research, and what successful alternative approaches might look like.
Meet the Panelists:
Edward Chang is an Assistant Professor of Business Administration in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. He teaches Negotiations in the MBA elective curriculum.
Professor Chang studies diversity in organizations. His research aims to unpack and understand diversity-related decisions in organizations, with a focus on providing evidence-based solutions to managers wanting to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. More generally, he is interested in how we can improve people’s decisions and behaviors on topics ranging from charitable donations to exercise to reducing meat consumption. Professor Chang runs large-scale field experiments, analyzes archival data, and conducts online and laboratory experiments to carry out his research.
Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard. He holds a B.A. from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. from Stanford University. His Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the Distinguished Scholarly Book Award from the American Sociological Association, charts how corporations have responded to anti-discrimination law since the 1960s. With Alexandra Kalev, he is developing an evidence-based approach to diversity management, using administrative data and panel surveys to explore how hiring, promotion, diversity, work-life and harassment policies have shaped both corporate management and university faculty over 30 years. Dobbin has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and the Safra Center for Ethics.
Garrett Johnson is a co-founder and executive director of the Lincoln Network. He also co-founded SendHub.com, a venture-backed-Y Combinator startup launched in 2011. He served as professional staff to the Ranking Member of the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where his oversight portfolio included Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Haiti. Originally from Florida, Garrett earned a bachelor’s degree from Florida State University. He also read for the degree of Master of Philosophy in Migration Studies at the University of Oxford, England as a Rhodes Scholar. Garrett currently lives in North Florida.
Meet the Moderator:
Ilana Redstone is an Associate Professor of sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has a joint Ph.D. in demography and sociology from the University of Pennsylvania. Ilana is the founder of Diverse Perspectives Consulting, the co-author of “Unassailable Ideas: How Unwritten Rules and Social Media Shape Discourse in American Higher Education,” a Faculty Fellow at Heterodox Academy, and the creator of the “Beyond Bigots and Snowflakes” video series, based on her course by the same name.
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