HR-EQUALITY AND DIVERSITY AT WORK

HR-Equality and Diversity at Work



HR-Equality and Diversity at Work

Introduction

As a response to the shifting population demographics in the United States, issues related to diversity have received increased attention in recent years. The word diversity simply means difference, but the term is most commonly used to refer to differences among people (Lawrence and Ruy, 1991). The ways in which individuals may differ from one another are considerable. This paper discusses HR quality and diversity at workplace in a concise and comprehensive way.

HR-Equality and Diversity at Work

In its 1987 report Workforce 2000, the Hudson Institute, a public policy research center, noted that white males were already a minority in the workplace and predicted that by the year 2000, 85 percent of new entrants to the workforce would be women, nonwhites, and immigrants. Faced with these demographic shifts, business leaders have begun to reassess their management practices, and many now endorse "diversity management"—a management philosophy that seeks to accommodate and benefit from the increasing diversity of the workforce. Diversity management refers to a wide range of practices, including audits to determine the extent of institutional racism in the workplace, policies to reduce discrimination, and sensitivity training in culture, race, and gender differences.

Many analysts contend that because of the changes in the workforce highlighted by Workforce 2000, diversity management is essential for business success (Lawrence and Ruy, 1991). To proponents, diversity management is a strategy to extract as much productivity as possible from an increasingly diverse labor pool. According to Sharon Nelton of Nation's Business magazine, "Managing diversity ... [means] fostering an environment in which workers of all kinds ... can flourish and ... give top performance to a company." R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr., author of Beyond Race and Gender, agrees: "The goal is to manage diversity in such a way as to get from a diverse work force the same productivity we once got from a homogeneous work force."

Others criticize diversity management for causing discord between workers. For example, writer Heather MacDonald contends that in their overly zealous attempts to expose racism among employees, diversity consultants hired by businesses often stir up conflict rather than ease tensions between different groups. Others argue that diversity management is often simply an attack on white men. Steven Yates, author of Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong with Affirmative Action, writes that "today's 'sensitivity training' seems intended to inculcate in the white male who is turned down for a job or a promotion in favor of a less qualified woman or minority that, as a member of the oppressor group, he had it coming!" MacDonald and others argue that this perception has led to resistance to diversity training on the part of many white men, adding to the stresses already present in the workplace (Gurin, Lehman & Lewis, 2004).

The approach to diversity that one adopts has implications for counseling practice and research. For example, a therapist who adopts a narrow approach to diversity while working with an older Latina lesbian may overlook critical issues ...