Sociological Experiment

The purpose of this post has no particular point or statement to make, but instead is just to share some observations about race and diversity in the workplace.

In my capacity as a software consultant, I have the opportunity to visit lots of companies.  While no substitute for a scientific study, my observations over the years do tend to indicate some general conclusions.

If I walk through a lunchroom in a plant, I can observe plenty of interesting social trends.  In some places men tend to sit with men, women with women.  But that's not consistently true - I've seen lunchrooms where there's no discernable division in the associations of men and women.

But there's certainly an observable racial trend.  Here's what I've observed:

Where hispanics are mostly first-generation immigrants who may not have fully developed English language skills, they tend to self-segregate.  But those folks of hispanic origin who may be native to the US are much more likely to be sitting with the white workers.

I notice that Asians are also not completely predictable in their associations, unless you separate them by country of origin.  I observe that, say, Vietnamese are more likely to self-segregate in the lunchroom than those from Japan or Korea.

Black people often self-segregate, but not consistently.  It's very common to see some black people mixing comfortably with the white and hispanic groups, while others continue to self-segregate.  My working theory that's somewhat backed up by observation when I know a bit about the backgrounds of individuals is that the best identifiable factor in this trend is education level.  It seems that college-educated black persons are more likely to feel comfortable interacting with the white and hispanic employees than those with less education.

I haven't observed any self-segregation by Indian immigrants; they generally seem to be making an effort to integrate with their co-workers.  Although the Sikh immigrants may be an exception; but I haven't observed enough of that group to draw any specific conclusions.

White groups I don't find exclusive to their own race.  In fact, they seem quite open and welcoming to anyone who would like to join them, regardless of race or national origin.  Certainly there are exceptions with specific white cliques, but they seem to be exclusive more from a resistance to shuffling long-established relationships than from a racial bias.

Of course, I have never observed any open conflict or hostility between groups.  People tend to hang out with other people with whom they feel comfortable.  It's hard to be comfortable when there's a language barrier and cultural differences, which seems a good explanation for the self-segregation I see with Southeast Asians and first-generation hispanic immigrants.

Certainly the main trend I have noticed over the years is the significant increase in the population of immigrants in nearly all workplaces.  It's fascinating to see the number of employees born in America, regardless of race, shrinking significantly while the population of immigrant employees has exploded.  That trend is commonly celebrated as a virtue by most companies - but I struggle to identify exactly what's virtuous about importing folks from outside the country to fill your open positions while millions of American citizens can't find work.