In recent years, organizations have increasingly set diversity hiring targets that pledge to hire more individuals with marginalized identities. Although organizations may be well-intentioned in doing so, we argue that these hiring targets have the potential to breed their own forms of bias. In this paper, we integrate racial capitalism theory with research on intersectionality to suggest that diversity hiring targets lead decision makers to engage in diversity commodification and use an intersectional selection lens that favors candidates based on the number and content of their marginalized identities. Specifically, across three studies, we find that diversity hiring targets can lead to a preference for candidates with multiple marginalized identities along their gender and race (e.g., Black women and other racial minority women) over candidates with fewer marginalized identities (e.g., a Black man). We also find that the preference for Black women may be greater than that of other racial minority women, indicating that the former are the prototypical individual of organizational diversity efforts. Finally, we find other marginalized identities (e.g., sexual orientation) may be peripheral to the organizational selection lens and their effects may amplify existing preferences. Taken together, these findings highlight the need to carefully examine organizational diversity efforts like diversity hiring targets and the biases they may inadvertently reinforce.
