A company’s diversity initiatives may only be as good as the sophistication of its privacy program. While data can provide invaluable benchmarks in an organization’s quest to become more inclusive, a failure to properly understand global data protection laws may be pushing companies to ignore those opportunities altogether. Thus, businesses can become overly cautious in using employee data, especially around categories such as race, ethnicity or sexual orientation.

“I think it can have a chilling effect if companies are not aware of … how to collect and process this data, from a privacy perspective. A lot of times companies will see this and think ‘oh, well, we just can’t collect it,’ because they don’t understand what sort of process they have to put in place around that,” said Liz Harding, a shareholder at Polsinelli.