In the U.K., the U.S. and elsewhere, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs are under attack from right-wing populists, with many companies abandoning or scaling back initiatives that they had previously trumpeted as a sign of their commitment to combatting social problems. The backlash has understandably fuelled fears that advances that have been hard-won over the past half century will be rolled back to the disadvantage of non-whites, women, those with disabilities and others.
Apart from signalling an attempt to return to an era when many of the workers’ rights that are today taken for granted did not exist, this episode is unedifying for business. Not only does it indicate that many leaders are not as “authentic” as they like to make out and cannot be trusted (just as, by the way, all that empathy they supposedly displayed during the pandemic has given way to a more hard-nosed management style now that a return to office working is flavour of the month). It also suggests that those leaders lack an awareness of how the world really is.
Joycelyn David is an experienced marketer whose recently-published book The Multicultural Mindset is essentially a call for companies to look beyond DEI’s associations with race and gender and to see how embracing different cultures can create opportunities and drive growth. As a Canadian, David grew up with the results of her country being a pioneer in introducing diversity programs through the adoption of multiculturalism as official government policy back in the 1970s. This experience has fuelled her belief that acknowledging differences does not have to be a “binary” experience where one group of people wins at the expense of another. Adopting a multicultural perspective will be more nuanced than being “woke” or anti-woke, she says.
While the tariffs imposed by President Trump at the same time as he is waging a campaign against DEI are — for now, at least — encouraging isolationism, ultimately countries and companies alike need to do business beyond their borders. Success in that depends on making connections with people, which in turn involves understanding culture and realising that this is, as David says, “not about skin colour.”
Even at home, though, trying to protect one sector of the population from what it sees as losing jobs to other groups is less than sound business. Hiring people from different backgrounds and with different experiences through their gender or disability is not just fairer it is good for business. Having a diverse workforce helps a company serve different customer groups through such means as picking up on trends and understanding issues of which executives may not be aware.
This is not to say, however, that DEI programs are not without their problems. Many see them as “performative,” with many organizations accused of “jumping on bandwagons” to be seen to be doing “the right thing” only to give up on them when public attention has shifted elsewhere or to be found to be failing from a social point of view in other aspects of how they do business.
Lily Zheng is an experienced DEI consultant who has been critical of the initiatives for about 10 years on the grounds that they do not take sufficient account of what makes people learn and makes organisations change. The author of DEI Deconstructed and a companion workbook Reconstructing DEI, Zheng says that the programs have often been counter-productive through being too dogmatic, while many organizations have adopted them in a cynical fashion in much the same way as corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives were frequently seen as aids to marketing.
A better approach, Zheng believes, would be centred on a framework called FAIR — for fairness, access, inclusion and representation — that was set out in an article in the Harvard Business Review at the beginning of this year. Rather than trying to reset DEI, organisations should use data to establish what they need to do to ensure that all of their operations measure up against each of these aspects. “The core idea is that everyone deserves these things. It’s more of a win-win approach,” they say.
The concept of using data in this area is also favoured by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev in a more recent article in the HBR. They write that “a growing body of evidence suggests that many management innovations designed to improve performance actually boost workforce diversity naturally — and do so without inviting the backlash that formal DEI programs can incur.” They add that, in an effort to do more with fewer workers, executives in a variety of industries are using high-performance management tools to target such areas as recruitment (through hiring the best people in the first place), training, mentoring and work-life support (through helping every employee to find their right career path and to thrive) and retention (through ensuring that if cuts are necessary they are based on performance rather than the individual’s function or length of time in the company).
Given that there seems to be general agreement that fear and a sense of loss are key emotions on the part of those who see themselves as the victims of DEI policies, it makes sense to try to recast the approach in a more positive light. But in the end there is no escaping the fact that improving access is almost certainly bound to lead to poorer performers who were previously tolerated in the absence of better alternatives losing out.