He chats with colleagues about soccer during breaks in meetings, uses a company car, makes phone calls on a company phone, and works out at the same gym as employees. According to Philine Erfurt, that is a rough idea of the typical manager found at most German businesses, despite calls for greater diversity in the workforce. And he is also still employers’ preference. As part of her dissertation in the “Path Dependency” research training group at Freie Universität, junior scholar Erfurt studied why it is so difficult for employers to break free of conventional decision-making processes when hiring staff – and how to bring different perspectives to management levels.