Does communication about the importance of diversity really help in Diversity hiring?

I wrote about how having a very big vision alone is not sufficient, and we need to break that into smaller chunks of actionable projects.  A very big challenge can often be broken into simpler chunk of questions.  Of course, designing these questions correctly is tricky. For example, let us take the problem statement “Does communication about the importance of diversity really help in Diversity hiring?”.  If someone challenges the efficacy of this, in an enterprise, what will we do?  This is where the concept of Micro-Experiments will be useful. Micro experiments break down the problem into manageable chunks of questions. The first guiding principle in such a question is what sort of data sets will help you in proving or disproving this hypothesis? If there was a definite date when we decide to communicate the importance of Diversity, then we can do a before and after analysis. But the challenge is multiple variables would have changed in an enterprise. When I was reviewing the literature, I found the dissertation work done by Jeffrey A.Flory et al. very useful in this regard. The researchers did something very unique. They designed a control and treatment group on the career website visitors applying for jobs.

The control group did not receive any message about the importance of Diversity, but the treatment group received messages about the importance of Diversity on their career application pages. Their analysis suggests that signals valuing workplace diversity drove up applicant pool interest (statistically significant).

Let us look at this graph below. Promoting diversity (different messages of diversity) across the treatment groups always drove up the applicant rates.