By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
Law firms and legal departments continue to lag behind when it comes to racial diversity. Based on several indicators, the legal profession is still among the least ethnically and racially diverse professions in the United States. Those who do the hiring in legal fields are well aware of this gap and doing what they can to close it. The reasons I most often hear for increasing diversity in the fields of law come down to client expectations and a general sense of ethical responsibility. Both are obviously well worth paying attention to, but social science points toward an even better reason for seeking to build a legal team with greater racial diversity: That team will be a better and a more effective team.
We have written before on the tendency for teams with greater racial diversity to do better on tasks because they’re more likely to avoid groupthink. Because they are talking across subcultural lines, they make fewer assumptions and more fully vet their reasons and their options. That diversity advantage applies to juries and to legal teams as well. But a new story from NPR’s social science correspondent, Shankar Vedantam, points to another advantage as well, extending beyond small group decision making. Noting an unusual recent finding (Ananat, Fu, & Ross, 2013) that racial wage gaps are actually wider in bigger cities than they are in rural areas, the story discusses the ways lower levels of diversity may be impacting companies’ bottom lines. The article ends with the intriguing suggestion from lead researcher Elizabeth Ananat that “code-switchers,” or “people adept at talking across differences and who relate well to those from other groups” are likely to provide a business development advantage to the company. This post looks at why that would be true based on the research, and adds a note on why code-switchers are likely to be better persuaders as well.
What is the “Spillover Effect” and Why Do Code-Switchers Help?
Let’s go back for a moment to that unusual finding recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (Ananat, Fu, & Ross, 2013): Minority wages lag the most in larger American cities. We would tend to think the opposite: Open-mindedness and progressive attitudes thrive in urban areas while the provinces are likely to be less tolerant and, dare we say it, racist. What the researchers discovered, however, is that these attitudes are only part of the story, and not the most important part. Instead, the gap appears to be driven by the patterns of social interaction within and not between races.
Part of that interaction is what economists call the “spillover effect,” and it explains why businesses do well when they concentrate geographically: banks on Wall Street and production studios in Hollywood. Either business might find lower capital costs in Ohio, but by grouping together, they’re able to benefit from a critical mass — shared people, ideas, and support resources — they wouldn’t enjoy on their own. That is the spillover effect, and an important part of it doesn’t happen through formal business communications, but through informal interactions. And, whether in big cities or in rural areas, those interactions are still more likely to occur in same-race settings than in cross-race settings. As Elizabeth Ananat explained to NPR:
“A black engineer in Silicon Valley has 980 more black engineers to get spillovers from than does a black engineer in Topeka,” she writes in an email. “Meanwhile, a white engineer in Silicon Valley has 8,500 more white engineers to benefit from than a white engineer in Topeka. Thus, while both white and black engineers’ wages will be higher in Silicon Valley than in Topeka, the white engineer’s wages will increase more than the black engineer’s do – in effect, the white engineer is living in a much bigger city (of engineers) than the black engineer is, if only people within one’s own race matter for urban spillovers.”
Of course, litigators will recognize that there is another name for this “spillover:” It is the networking that lies at the heart of business development. The trick seems to be to get past the practice in which most of this networking happens within race or ethnic groups. That is where the code-switchers come in. The individual who grew up in a largely black community, for example, and then went to Harvard law, has probably learned to easily move back and forth between white and black groups, adapting her communication as she goes. So the code-switcher is able to break down the social walls that artificially limit beneficial spillover in business. In short, the abilities that make one an effective code-switcher also make for broader and better networking.
Where Else Do Code-Switchers Have an Advantage?
Beyond the business development and client services advantage, there is a reason to believe that litigators and litigation departments in particular should be interested in code-switchers: They may be better persuaders. One thing that predicts effective persuaders is something called “Rhetorical Sensitivity” (Hart & Brooks, 1972). A social science concept, it means the ability to appreciate and adapt to variations in purpose, context, and audience. Instead of just blurting out reasons and saying, “That is what I think, take it or leave it,” the rhetorically sensitive person realizes that there are many ways to get a message across and, in particular contexts, some ways are better and some are worse. So the rhetorically sensitive persuader strategically selects the right tool for the right situation.
Now, I don’t know that the study has been done, but the likelihood that those with code-switching experience are more rhetorically sensitive seems true almost by definition. The code-switcher is engaged in continuous cultural adaptation. I recall one very long trial I worked on which included a very large group of Spanish-speaking fact witnesses and clients. For that case, we worked with a team of bilingual associates who were continuously moving between Spanish and English as they worked on the case. Because they had the benefits of speaking in both worlds, so to speak, I believe this group generally had the best appreciation of the persuasive challenges in this case.
Even while persuasion in the courtroom takes place in just one language, the experiences of moving back and forth in languages, or the experiences a racial minority has had in moving between subcultures, are likely to make the code-switcher into a more sensitive, nuanced, and adaptive legal persuader.
Doing good and meeting client expectations are both great reasons to remember diversity when hiring or building a trial team. But performance-related reasons are even better. Better networking, communication, decision making, and persuasion are some pretty good performance-related reasons.
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Other Posts on Diversity:
- Take a Note From an Anonymous Law Firm: Don’t Look For Discrimination if You Don’t Intend to Do Anything About It
- Female Attorneys: Expect (But Don’t Accept) a Subtle Bias in the Courtroom
- That’s Right, The Women Are Smarter: Pay Attention to Your Jury’s Social Intelligence
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Ananat, E., Fu, S., & Ross, S. L. (2013). Race-Specific Agglomeration Economies: Social Distance and the Black-White Wage Gap (No. w18933). National Bureau of Economic Research.
Hart, R. P., & Burks, D. M. (1972). Rhetorical sensitivity and social interaction.Communications Monographs, 39(2), 75-91.
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