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Show f$e A6 i HK DAILY HKRALI), Provo, l Uih, Tuesdav. Ortlr 15, 1W6 iversity Christopher Aver)', an economist at Harvard University who worked with Dr. Athey. For example, the models help explain why companies that are not diverse tend to slay that way, unless people in the minority get some sort of boost. The results also suggest that over the long term, a diverse company may be more or profitable than a homogeneous, one. In general, a company should ch(X)se whom to promote based on the expected future value of workers. In a paper under review at an economics journal, the researchers use math to describe how different types of workers may be more or less valuable to a company. Value calculations depend on two key how similar the worker factors is to people in management and how far into the future companies make projections. Any managerial majority whether it is characterized by men, white people, people from Ivy league sclnxils or extrov erted peotends to define the corporate ple culture. Workers tend to thrive when By KATY HUMAN Knight-R.-dde- f Newspapers DALLAS When people debate affirmative action, they Usually talk about the good or harm it does for the individuals involved or for society. But having a diverse set of managers may also make the company more profitable, a new analysis suggests. "There are actually efficiency reasons to care about the diversity in vour organization," says economist Susan Athey of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Mass. . Dr. Athey and two colleagues used mathematical equations to represent the costs and benefits Chat companies should consider when choosing whom to promote. The economists essentially created mathematical models of managers win) always make the right decision the one that maximizes their company's profits. What emerges from the models are hypothetical companies that behave like real companies in some interesting ways, says non-divers- e, Babies of obese moms suck harder, study says I : i l ' ' , ' - By DANIEL Q. HANEY AP Medical Editor ' . . !.,' , j show the first signs of what's to come w hen they are just 3 months old. doctors have found. Even then, they really love to eat. Using a special computerized bottle, the researchers discovered that babies with overweight mothers exhibit what they politely call a "vigorous feeding style." ; Simply put. they suck more aggressively. People inherit a tendency to be lat or i'. appetite, willingness to the exercise and metabolic rate amount of calories one burns w hen all run in families. ;doing nothing No one knows, though, just how much obesity comes from children imitating their parents' unhealthy eating and exercise habits and how much is wired into the genes at birth. That's what makes the study of infants so interesting to researchers. It's unlikely that in the first months life they have already picked up their parents' attitudes toward food. Instead, whatever they are doing is probably instinctive. Dr. Robert I. Berkowitz and colleagues from the University of Pennsylvania studied 39 babies mothers were average kwhose '.weight and 40 whose mothers were obese. The babies with the f at mothers were considered to be ul high risk of developing obesity themselves someday. The mothers fed the babies with a bottle that was wired to a .computer to record the number of times they sucked during their meal. Berkowitz described the results Sunday at a meeting of the North American Association for the Study of" Obesity. Berkow itz found that the high-ris- k babies sucked 930 times dur50 percent ing their feeding more than the other infants. They ticked an average of 45 times a minute, compared with 36 times for the others. babies also conThe high-ris- k sumed about 20 percent more formula, and by age 1. had started to put on more weight. Dr. William Dietz. of Tufts Medical School in Boston questioned the significance of the infants' robust sucking, since larger babies clearly need more food. "I would expect that bigger infants would suck more to feed more because they are bigger." he .said. The study's ultimate goal, Berkowitz said, is to find an early warning signal of obesity. We 'want to identify people early so w e can come in with ways of prevention." he said. Childhood obesity is emerging as a serious health problem. Statin stics show that 25 percent of between ages 6 and 17 are loverweight. Typically they go on Ito become obese adults, who are Iprone to a variety of ser ious health problems, including heart disease land diabetes. Other studies have shown that I older children with a tendency to weight problems are more likely than other youngsters to gulp down their food. ! Berkowitz plans to follow the g babies through childhood to see if they indeed do Ibeeome overweight. He noted that .unusual weight gain by age I often ;has little to do with how much someone weighs when they grow f " , - ' ' ',' - ,; v" ' ' V ' .' "''"( . . ' ''II f , -- i1 , , ; i ... . 'I VV'""' , , , , r, '! c , f St' '"ii " .' y i ; - 1 - - , . - , , f - I 5j . i ' , .1 t a , BKK'KENRIDGE. Colo. f olks w ho are likely to get fat may ,v . v . , ' ; ' v v . m if ",.'.'' ' " group, says Dr. Athey. supplant them." say Dr. Avery. "The diversity of current manSocial and governmental presagement affects the quality of the sure can force companies to propoo! of subsequent management mote a critical mass of minorities, candidates, the authors wrote in or a company may end up with that their paper. To attract the most talcritical mass accidentally. If a ented people in the future, a compagroup of women or minorities find should start and their way into upper management, ny hiring promoting minorities now. Dr. Athey says. they may alter the culture enough, "You can get trapped," Dr. or mentor other workers effectively Avery explains. "If you're not enough, that other minorities can managing the process carefully, make it up the corporate ladder. J "A firm might rationally oppose you might tend to drift in a direction that's not profitable in the Song the efforts of minorities to reach run." A company loses out by management early on." the authors ignoring talented workers who wrote, "but if they make sufficient don't match the majority. progress on their own, the firm The trick, then, is to steer a com- might support their continued pany that is not diverse over a math- efforts w ith favorable oiases. ematical ditch toward diversity. There's already a bias in most Hiring or promoting one or two promotion decisions. Dr. Avery minorities isn't enough. In the says. Generally, managers are models, companies that try that biased toward workers that are workers usually end up back where they more similar to them started. The minorities don't get who they suspect will do best in the near future, since they'll get enough mentoring to do well. there's effective a sense "Mathematically, training. Companies with in which you need a critical mass of a long-terperspective may people in leadership roles, and until decide to reconsider those biases, you have that critical mass, you Dr. Aveiy says, in order to take can't hope to produce a lot more to advantage of available talent. type. Even if these two are perfectly matched in terms of past performance, a majority type worker who fits in better is likely to become more valuable, more quickly. "Men and women w ho start out equal don't end up equal due to mentoring." says Dr. Avery. According to the math, that can mean that a company that is not diverse tends to remain not diverse, since the company would take an economic hit by hiring minorities. It's a mathematical glass ceiling. Dr. Athey explains. "Firms face a cost of transitioning from homogeneous to heterogeneous. The cost is that along the way, the first few people (in the minority) are not very valuable to you because they're not functioning very' well in your organization." she says. Interestingly, the math also indicates that when companies do somehow get a diverse set of people in management, they tend to stay diverse. That's because they can then attract, train and support the best and the brightest in the field an increasingly diverse they match the majority, while workers in the minority can suffer. have described Sociologists how this tendency can keep the upper echelons of a company pretty uniform. If almost all managers are extroverted, for example, introverted people who may prefer not to join Friday happy hours can lose out on the informal mentoring and information gathering that can happen over a beer. This informal mentoring can significantly help workers who are similar to the majority and hurt workers in the minority. "People who are similar are going to fit in better," says Dr. Athey. That means that majority types improve more quickly and are more likely to be promoted than minority types. As the new economic models indicate, this inequality-reinforcin- g bias makes perfect sense in the short term. For a company, it can be costly to promote someone who isn't going to work out. one a Imagine two workers minority type and one a majority I ft ' IMIIIIK ' i..H'r'T I' r.:?r'i: ' ' ' 'f. ,' - . i - ,f ' ' f '' X ' '.. : ' "; ' : s-'-s4j- Perhaps, he thought. 'The nunrvg of the Bulls" was riot the bst place ,, to break in a hip replacement .' ' : ' - ' " ' " . - ' '" '. ''X . 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