Recruiting for diversity has been deemed to require heavy-handed policy interventions to counter homophilic attraction between organizational members and candidates. In this paper we suggest and originally test whether individuals, in addition to being drawn to similar others, also appreciate diverse environments for their own sake and are more likely to join organizations the more diverse their extant workforce. To rule out that pro-diversity recruiting policies would distort our findings, we resort to a hiring policy–free environment for our investigations in which individuals may independently decide to become part of the collective by contributing to it: Wikipedia. Our findings, obtained on 4,218,531 joining decisions of Wikipedians to 745,815 projects, confirm our hypothesis. We discuss the relevance and generalizability of our results.
