Attorney touts positive relation between diversity, revenue
A Kansas City, Mo., trial lawyer spoke on the positive correlation of diversity and corporate revenue, along with the importance of diversity in the workplace, earlier this week at the Arkansas Bar Association’s 120th annual meeting.
Dana Tippin Cutler, an attorney of 29 years and co-star of “Couples Court with the Cutlers,” a televised court show, said that although businesses may not want to admit it, “business is all about making the Benjamins.”
“The best case for diversity is the bottom line,” Cutler said Thursday. “At the end of the day I would love for people to want to have diversity because it’s the right thing to do, but as a business owner I know we need to make money.”
Cutler shared data from an analysis of corporations revealing companies with a more diverse workforce had higher revenue percentages than companies with a lower amount of diversity among their employees.
“Those in the top quarter percentile are 50 percent more likely to see an increase over the revenue median in various industries with more diverse staff. Those in the highest percentiles made 36 percent more than companies that choose not to be diverse,” she said.
Cutler highlighted companies such as Walmart, Home Depot and Facebook that have made efforts for more diverse staff and reaped the benefits.
“We’ve found that if your law firm or company recruits and retains women, people or color or the LGBTQ community; or reflects the community in which you live, you have a better chance of being successful,” she said.
She discussed the issues of implicit bias, microaggression and retention, which she believes are issues that cause lower averages of diversity among company employees.
Cutler explained that many people are guilty of their own implicit bias, or the inclination toward one way of thinking, often based on life experience.
“I one time conducted an interview for a woman named Lakwanda. When a white female arrived, I asked her after a few brief moments when Lakwanda would be joining us. The woman smiled and it dawned on me that she was in fact Lakwanda,” she said. “Every Lakwanda I had met looked like me! Sometimes implicit bias can be neutral like this, but often it can be negative.”
Cutler urged those in attendance to read diverse literature and challenged the audience to be open to different religious experiences. She ended her speech by encouraging the attorneys and attendees to be gracious when conducting conversations about race and diversity.
“You can’t think differently if you don’t do anything differently. Get involved with people that hold different opinions than you,” she said.