Book Talk | Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t

In-person registration for this event is now closed. If you would like to join the event via Zoom, please RSVP HERE.

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and its Race and Public Space working group invite you to a book talk on Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t, featuring co-author Frank Dobbin in conversation with Maria Abascal and Valerie Purdie Greenaway.

Every year America becomes more diverse, but change in the makeup of the management ranks has stalled. The problem has become an urgent matter of national debate. How do we fix it? Bestselling books preach moral reformation. Employers, however well intentioned, follow guesswork and whatever their peers happen to be doing.  Arguing that it’s time to focus on changing systems rather than individuals, Frank Dobbin will discuss his comprehensive, data-driven analysis of what succeeds and what fails. 

Frank Dobbin is Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences, and chair of the Department of Sociology, at Harvard.  His Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton U. Press 2009) shows how HR managers and activists defined what it meant to discriminate in the eyes of the law, elaborating the definition over time. His Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t with Alexandra Kalev (Harvard U. Press [Belknap] 2022) looks at the effectiveness of dozens of different diversity programs, in over 800 companies across more than 30 years, to answer the questions: Which programs help, which hurt, and how can harmful programs be improved?

Maria Abascal is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at New York University. Her research examines responses to ethnoracial diversity and diversification using experimental and survey methods.

Valerie Purdie-Greenaway serves as Director for the Laboratory of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind (LIRSM) at Columbia University. She is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, core faculty for the Robert Wood Johnson Health & Society Scholars Program (RWJ Columbia-site), and research fellow at the Institute for Research on African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia. Dr. Purdie-Greenaway has authored numerous publications that have appeared in journals such as Science, Psychological Science, and Journal of Personality & Social Psychology.