How did the Covid-19 pandemic affect diversity communication among Global 500 companies?

Diversity management has become popular among many organizations globally because of its potential positive effects on business outcomes. Over the years, organizations have communicated their diversity policies online to attract relevant stakeholders. Despite the growing importance of diversity communication, there is little research to tell us if external factors such as the Covid-19 pandemic affect diversity communication and financial performance's effect on diversity communication during Covid-19. This paper aimed to fill these gaps by exploring the trends in diversity communication across sixty Global 500 organizations by comparing pre-Covid (2018-2019) and during-Covid (2020-2021) data and investigating the interaction effects of financial performance differences in Covid-19 on those organizations’ diversity communication. To do so, it employs the theoretical framework provided by Ely and Thomas (2001), which defines three types of diversity perspectives, and an automated content analysis tool -DivPAR, to analyze diversity communication. Tobin’s Q was applied to measure financial performance, and subsequently, the effects of Covid-19 and the financial performance differences on diversity communication were examined. The results elucidated that during the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations’ diversity communication continued along with the same upward trend that was seen in previous years. Unexpectedly, it appears every organization continued doing what they were doing in terms of their diversity communication, despite the financial performance differences caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the underdeveloped literature on the topic and provides valuable insights, such as the interesting pattern regarding how diversity perspectives evolve in diversity management development for future research. Due to the sample size limitation of Global 500 organizations, future research should investigate the diversity perspectives within broader cultural backgrounds and industries to examine diversity communication differences within different contexts. Other valuable avenues of research would be to examine the similarities and differences between CSR-related and diversity communication, and verify the “windowdressing” phenomenon by investigating if the diversity communication involves actual behaviours. In addition, besides using different financial measurements to investigate the effects, it is necessary to conduct other types of analyses to help us understand what other types of external elements could influence diversity communication. Finally, verifying the diversity management development pattern predicted in this study will be interesting.