Go to almost any company’s talent page or career site, and you’ll see images of diverse teams and employees. The rationale is that it infers congeniality and a welcoming spirit toward female and minority race candidates. But until recently, there’s been little field research demonstrating whether these depictions of diverse groups actually influence applicants’ employment decisions.

A recently published study aims to address this gap. Researchers from Boston University, Duke University, McGill University, and the behavior design consulting firm Irrational Labs conducted a field study testing the effect of diversity cues, conveyed through digital images of employees, on the quality and quantity of job candidates from minority groups and women.

Researchers built a jobs website for a hypothetical tech startup company. They recruited applicants through online advertising and randomly assigned them to view workforce images that were either high or low in gender diversity, racial and ethnic diversity, or both. 

The findings: There was little evidence suggesting that racial and ethnic or gender diversity in organizational materials affects the demographic composition of the applicant pool. The results contrast previous lab studies, which are often self-reported and show that diversity cues can increase organizational appeal when employee and applicant demographics match.

The study also investigated whether diverse images affect the quality of applicants in either direction. The results showed little evidence of this, with one exception. Women from underrepresented backgrounds were rated as more qualified when applying to organizations with racial/ethnic diversity but were rated as less qualified when applying to organizations without gender diversity.

The researchers offered several probable explanations for why diverse images did not lead to observable changes in the quality or quantity of minority applicants. One reason could be that because racially diverse images were collapsed into a general “non-white” category, applicants from a certain racial, ethnic, or gender identity (or both) may not have seen themselves as well-represented in the organization. For instance, a Black female applicant may not have seen herself represented in an image featuring a Middle Eastern-looking man. 

Another reason is that applicants’ motivation to find a suitable job overrode any diverse representation or lack thereof in organizational materials. “That is, perceptions of the organization may have genuinely changed as a result of the diversity manipulations, but these changes were not strong enough to translate into an unwillingness to forego potential employment,” the researchers write.

They also cited an unexpected result from the study, which is that organizations with no racial and ethnic or gender diversity received more applications than organizations with either racial and ethnic or gender diversity. While the researchers failed to offer a definitive explanation for this effect, a potential reason is that applicants perceived the lack of diversity as merely reflecting the status quo of privileging white men in the tech industry. “As a result, participants may have believed that the company was engaging in ‘passive discrimination’ by simply relying on industry-wide defaults in hiring practices,” researchers said.

The takeaway here isn’t to do away with diverse representation on company websites. Rather, it’s to call attention to the fact that a more diverse workforce does not guarantee more minority applicants. Organizations looking to recruit minority applicants must present stronger displays of their commitment to diversity and clearly communicate to applicants that their organization is one where women and people from underrepresented groups can anticipate being treated with fairness and respect.

Ruth Umoh
@ruthumohnews
ruth.umoh@fortune.com

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