When determining people’s values, it’s often better to look at what they do rather than what they say. That’s an interesting aspect of new research from Stanford Graduate School of Business, which explores how important diversity is to people, and what they’d be willing to do to secure more diversity.

The researchers wanted to explore whether new rules from the Securities and Exchange Commission to disclose all “human capital resources” that were material to the smooth operating of the business would prompt companies to disclose information about their diversity. The analysis found that less than 20% of companies disclosed such information.

Diverse workplaces

This prompted the researchers to ponder whether this lack of disclosure mattered to employees, or more pertinently, potential employees. After all, there has undoubtedly been considerable investment within organizations in diversity and inclusion. Do these efforts influence our decisions in terms of both who we want to work for and the salary we’d be willing to take?

The researchers worked with the online job platform Zippia, which assigns companies a diversity score based on the gender, education, race, and language skills of the workforce. In total, around 267,000 job hunters were given information about the workforce diversity at over 100,000 companies via over 5 million emails.

The participants were then sent either regular job listings based on their search preferences or listings that also featured the diversity score for each organization. The results showed that when people were shown diversity scores, the click-through rate was 3% higher for firms with higher diversity scores. Indeed, people seemed to be more responsive to a 1% change in diversity scores than they were a 1% change in salary.

This concern appeared to be most prevalent among younger and less experienced workers. The authors speculate that this could be because they’re actively looking for employers that are open and transparent.

It should also be noted that firms with a high diversity score were also more likely to disclose diversity metrics under the SEC ruling, which appears to show a correlation with the importance given to the topic by these firms. The authors hope that their findings might act as a wake up call for the overwhelming majority that continue to keep such information private.

“83% of the firms seem to believe that diversity information is immaterial, yet our experiment finds a non-trivial willingness to pay for this information,” they conclude. “They may want to change their behavior. Job seekers care about diversity and companies could put more effort into disclosing it.”