> Now, a new paper raises questions about McKinsey’s methodology and suggests that its advertised findings may have gotten the causation backward: financial success may lead corporations to embrace diversity efforts, rather than the other way around.
Completely unsurprising.
> Since McKinsey refused to turn over its numbers, Green and Hand had to reverse-engineer the firm’s 2015, 2018, and 2020 datasets.
So it's still not completely settled who is right. But the fact McKinsey wouldn't turn over their dataset is suspicious. When one researcher works in the open and another does not, conflicting results are likely to favor the open researcher.
Any McKinsey client should insist that the consultants who worked on this report never work on their engagements. These consultants are either too stupid to realize that they got the causation backwards or they realized it but wrote up a garbage report anyway.
> Green and Hand not only were unable to replicate the studies’ findings; they also found that each of the three studies had analyzed the data backward. Instead of looking at a firm’s diversity policies in the years leading up to a given year’s financial performance, McKinsey had reviewed each firm’s financial performance in the four or five years leading up to the year in which its researchers snapshotted their executive demographics. In other words, according to Green and Hand, the positive correlations that McKinsey researchers observed may have reflected “better firm financial performance causing companies to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse.”
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 18.2 ms ] threadCompletely unsurprising.
> Since McKinsey refused to turn over its numbers, Green and Hand had to reverse-engineer the firm’s 2015, 2018, and 2020 datasets.
So it's still not completely settled who is right. But the fact McKinsey wouldn't turn over their dataset is suspicious. When one researcher works in the open and another does not, conflicting results are likely to favor the open researcher.
> Green and Hand not only were unable to replicate the studies’ findings; they also found that each of the three studies had analyzed the data backward. Instead of looking at a firm’s diversity policies in the years leading up to a given year’s financial performance, McKinsey had reviewed each firm’s financial performance in the four or five years leading up to the year in which its researchers snapshotted their executive demographics. In other words, according to Green and Hand, the positive correlations that McKinsey researchers observed may have reflected “better firm financial performance causing companies to diversify the racial/ethnic composition of their executives, not the reverse.”