This expressed reluctance to come to specific terms with general claims about the value of director diversity inspired our title phrase: dangerous categories. That is, while “diversity” evokes universal acclaim in the abstract, our respondents’ narratives demonstrate that it is an elusive and even dangerous subject to talk about concretely. So we are left with narratives that simultaneously extol difference and express embarrassment with it.

Unfortunately, the value added by board diversity is hard to prove with any rigor, as the indeterminate findings in the extensive empirical literature on the subject—including some of the contributions to this symposium—amply demonstrates. To be sure, the intuitions seem persuasive enough. If one treats the board as a work group, under the right circumstances having differing perspectives and differing backgrounds should prompt more creative problem-solving and blunt the tendencies toward “groupthink.” And as stakeholder groups (employees, customers, suppliers, etc.) become more diverse, having board members who are especially attuned to their interests and values should be productive, and also send a positive signal of firm sensitivity.

So why is it so hard to find tangible evidence of added value? My commentary will focus on two of the symposium contributions: the wonderfully interesting field study by Broome, Conley, and Krawiec (“BCK”), who asked board members to talk about their own observations of value added by having more diversity on corporate boards, and the intriguing empirical study by Dobbin and Jung (“DJ”), who try to explain troubling evidence that both share value and non-blockholding institutional ownership appear to drop when women are added to boards, even though there is no evidence that firm financial or accounting performance declines as a result. Before turning specifically to these, however, I want to explore a bit what may be a cause of the muddle—the fact that we have no coherent, consistent explanation for how boards themselves add value to the firm. Without knowing what boards really do in terms of economic value, it is hard to develop and test any useful hypothesis about their diversity.

For a considerable period of time, the primary argument in favor of increasing the diversity of corporate boards was that it would result in more successful companies. As noted above, this is referred to as the business case. In her most recent article, Professor Lisa Fairfax aptly points out that the business case for diversity on corporate boards of directors has had limited success. As Professor Fairfax explains, the success of the business case in demonstrating a positive correlation between board diversity and corporate performance is limited in at least two respects. First, the existing studies are at best equivocal. Second, notwithstanding the studies tending to show a correlation, the business case has not been successful in increasing board diversity in recent years. Professor Fairfax concludes that the business case should not crowd out the moral rationale. Professor Fairfax undoubtedly is correct that the business case has not been as robust a foundation of increased board diversity as proponents of an increase would prefer. There are a number of rationales to support board diversity and rather than simply question the strength of the business case rationale, the question that should be asked and is whether these other rationales, when combined with the business case, support legal rules and regulations that encourage increased board diversity.

The legal and empirical claims are unobjectionable, and for purposes of this paper, I will assume that they are right. However, the mismatch critique warrants careful unpacking. The strength of this critique turns on whether diversity advocates had or have better options realistically available to them. The authors make modest attempts to suggest a few, but none is systematically defended. In the end, their alternative suggestions are implausible or underspecified, which undermines the force of their mismatch critique.

In a similar fashion, Professor Sung Hui Kim has converted the important but benign amicus support that General Motors and sixty-five other major American corporations gave to the University of Michigan in Grutter v. Bollinger into a hypocritical “diversity double standard,” because they allegedly embraced a diversity standard in Grutter that they would not accept for themselves. According to Kim, the corporate amici argued “that universities should promote diversity because it’s good for business,” but did not “make even a passing reference to the economic self-interest of universities or, for that matter, any of the significant costs that affirmative action programs generate for universities.” Kim argues, however, that the very factors the corporate amici ignored in Grutter are central to their assessment of the appropriateness of diversity for themselves.