Designing for diversity

I've been dipping my toes into the literature on the importance, the value, of "diversity of thought" in business lately. Yes, there is actually a literature on this - mostly from the business world - yet another example of things I never realized someone was doing well. So many things aren't given their due in the practice of academic life, that it is like one easter egg after another some months.

So the thought that surfaced sometime yesterday (anywhere between being barely awake to going to sleep, I don't remember) was that one measure of diversity is how much all participants in an organization have to adapt to it when they arrive. Because usually, it is the women or the minorities or someone else who needs to become more outspoken, more confident, more assertive, more this and more that. And I think this results in a group that is less diverse, regardless of the reproductive organs or skin color or native language of the group's members.

I mean, how often do you hear, in addition to women having to become more assertive, that the men in a group had to become more sensitive to the feelings of others, and more soft-spoken? Maybe you have heard of it, and in that case I'd love to know where. Because apart from a few token sexual harassment seminars that don't actually require anyone's behavior be different in order to succeed in the field, I don't see talks about how males should practice acting less confident and being better at service roles in academia.