The folks at Fox are telling their business and creative teams to promote diversity on the network because diversity, it now appears, is good for business. This is good news. There remains a shocking lack of diversity in our television programming that should be rectified, and once the good intentions argument has become a good for business argument, success seems far more likely.

Said Broadcasting COO Joe Early:

“Not only are you going to have more chances of a show being made here, more chances of a show being a success on TV, more chances of making it into syndication, more chances of a show selling globally and making you millions of dollars, but you are going to bring more viewers to our air and keep us in business.”

This is proving true from more than just theory. A UCLA study found that shows with racially and ethnically diverse casts get better ratings than those with homogeneous casts. Fox is currently seeing success with the new drama Sleepy Hollow, which has an African-American woman in the lead role: Nicole Beharie as Detective Mills. Sleepy Hollow is one of only two shows on television that feature an African-American woman in the lead. The other is Kerry Washington in Scandal.

The idea that a diverse cast of characters that more accurately reflects television audiences would be a successful model for programming does not seem like a difficult conclusion to reach. But there’s no question that diversity remains a problem. The idea of diversity, and its promotion as a good in itself can sometimes cloud the important work that’s been done to bring more varied stories to audiences.

Whether or not profitability follows diversity, there are values inherent in providing audiences access to stories about all kinds of people in all kinds of places doing all kinds of things. No matter what demographic group you belong to, the majority of the human experience does not resemble your, or my, life.