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The case of Jason Arday shows that when a system of prestige institutions drops its standards on the basis of identity characteristics, the effects can be tragic. Cambridge University claims that Arday is an exception, but the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s new report, “The Equity-Excellence Tradeoff: a Study of EDI in the Canada Research Chairs Program,” suggests that he is the rule: equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) hiring damages academic excellence at scale. Nowhere is this more evident than in the prestigious Canada Research Chairs program.
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While academic researchers have debunked the unrigorous “diversity is our strength” claims of EDI champions like consulting firm McKinsey & Company, ours is the first quantitative study to show that EDI is not merely neutral, but can actively reduce organizational performance. This occurs through “diversity hiring” less capable individuals and funding scholar-activism.
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Existing scholarship and Harvard’s internal statistics establish that, on average, Black and Hispanic students are admitted to elite universities with lower test scores. They also generally perform less well on Advanced Placement (AP) tests in high school, as do females. Among faculty, women on the whole publish significantly fewer academic papers than men.
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As in the Arday case, the hiring bar is considerably lower for subaltern minorities and women. New work from sociologists Jukka Savolainen and Kevin McCaffree examining all candidates hired from 2019 to 2024 by the top 50 American sociology departments reveals that white males averaged eight publications while Black females averaged just two. Forty per cent of white men had published in the top two journals compared to four per cent of Black women.
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Furthermore, my re-analysis of data on American academic promotions from a prominent paper in Nature Human Behaviour shows that Black, Hispanic and female academics scored significantly lower on the industry standard h-index (papers multiplied by citations) than White, Asian and male academics.
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The systematic hiring of lower-achieving minorities and women affects the performance of organizations and programs. In order to assess this, we examined the prestigious federal Canada Research Chairs (CRC) program. This is the pinnacle of Canada’s research system, spending $300 million annually on renewable seven-year awards of between $100,000 and $200,000 per year.
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Beginning in 2003, and accelerating after 2017, the CRC program implemented an aggressive regime of diversity targets in which institutions that did not meet their quotas for female, minority and Indigenous chairs were threatened with losing their chair allocations. Canada’s Constitution allows for race and sex discrimination, thus CRC openings routinely state that able-bodied straight white males need not apply.