Latest trends in diversity management research

Research evidence excerpt

Latest trends in diversity management research

9 July 2026

Mizuho Securities Equity Research Strategy / Equity

Seminar Memo

Mizuho Securities Insight & Catalyst (IC) study session

Global Senior Strategist: Toward practical value creation through inclusion

Takaaki Hironaka The following summarizes a talk on "the latest trends in diversity management

+81 3 6202 8554 research" given on 7 July by Chikae Naito, Associate Professor of

takaaki.hironaka@mizuho-sc.com Management at the Waseda Business School (Waseda University).

This 7 July study session started with a discussion about whether businesses

actually need to work on issues such as DEI and diversity management in the

first place. Before tackling such issues, businesses must first ensure that all of

the various stakeholders recognize and accept the “legitimacy” of those efforts.

Legitimacy can be broadly separated into two main categories: 1) economic

legitimacy, which means the efforts contribute positively to securing human

resources, enhancing corporate earnings; and 2) ethical legitimacy, which

relates to the importance of investing in things like minority attributes and the

realization of equality. With respect to individuals, the word ‘attributes’, as used

in the previous sentence, refers not only to obvious surface-level attributes

such as the individual’s race or biological gender, but also to deeper attributes

that are not as easily seen, such as nationality or gender identity. Diversity is

thus defined as a broad diffusion of these various individual attributes.

There is an abundance of research on the ways in which companies benefit

from diversity. Most of the early research simply verified and documented the

relationship between diversity and corporate earnings, but eventually it came