Diversity is Not our Strength

Tweet:

Trump: Our country wasn’t built on diversity.

New paper:

Claims about the value and benefits of diversityFootnote 1 have proliferated in recent decades, becoming a contemporary secular credo that animates the spirit of almost all elite institutions of the English-speaking world. Consider, for example, President Bill Clinton’s proclamation, in his State of the Union Address, that “we must never, ever believe that our diversity is a weakness—it is our greatest strength” (Clinton, 1997). Nowadays, such contentions about the value and benefits of diversity—what we refer to as the “Diversity Hypothesis”—are commonplace, even axiomatic. ...

Consistent with these formulations of the Diversity Hypothesis, in an article for The New York Times, Nicholas Kristoff asserted that “scholarly research suggests that the best problem-solving doesn’t come from a group of the best individual problem-solvers, but from a diverse team whose members complement each other” (Kristoff, 2013). Similarly, Phillips and colleagues argued in a highly cited article in Scientific American that decades of research “shows that socially diverse groups…are more innovative than homogeneous groups” (Phillips et al., 2014). More recently, in the specific context of science, Smith, in an op-ed for Canada’s University Affairs, asserted “the evidence is unambiguous: diversity fosters more original, widely recognized and impactful science” (Smith, 2025). ...

In the context of the Diversity Hpothesis in science, although the scientific literature comprises numerous studies that support the claim that diversity results in better and more impactful science, it is also replete with studies that not only do not support the claim, but contradict it.

It reviews 104 papers, and finds that they are mostly against the diversity hypothesis.