“DEI”ng out?

Unfortunately, this will not be the most spicy, opinionated, outrageous article you have ever read about racism, but hopefully, you will leave feeling slightly more informed about something. Sources tend to disagree about the actual trajectory of diversity, equity and inclusion programs in the workplace, but overall, it seems the initiatives and policies have been fading out of trend.

Do we just hate each other now? Has the age of the white male returned?

Rewind!

Everyone can recall the surge of anti-racist activism that immediately followed the death of George Floyd in 2020. A CNBC article by Jennifer Elias notes that vocal commitments to install D.E.I. programs in the tech industry flared brightly just after Floyd’s murder.

A few years later, in 2023, the Supreme Court “rejected the use of race-conscious admissions in higher education,” according to NPR. In other words, affirmative action left the higher academic table. This set off “a wave of similar lawsuits and legal threats against company diversity programs,” according to a New York Times article titled “D.E.I. Goes Quiet”.

The fall of affirmative action did not directly cause the decrease in DEI programs, though. Rather, it was an earlier symptom of a broader movement. “Even before this year, corporate diversity, equity and inclusion efforts have come under harsh criticism, including that they’re expensive, performative, even a source of division themselves,” writes Andrea Hsu for NPR. “[C]onservative legal activists… argue that DEI policies and programs constitute racial discrimination,” she says. This is not too difficult to understand; drawing attention to a difference can create undue and unhealthy polarization between the parties. 

Although some would argue that, four years after the anti-racist explosion, DEI is being naturally nudged out of the spotlight, others claim that it has immediate relevance to the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Elias claims that “the cuts come as the tech industry doubles down on artificial intelligence. With fewer diverse voices represented in AI development, the resulting products could be less accurate or more harmful to users,” she writes.

However, let us not get ahead of ourselves. Before continuing to see whether there are side effects of the loss of DEI, it would be prudent for the reader to hear that perhaps DEI is not really declining. “Despite what… stories suggest, in reality DEI is growing,” writes Julie Kratz, for Forbes. Kratz cites a Littler study that shows that “More than half of U.S. executives say their organizations have expanded their [DEI] strategies over the past year,” Kratz writes. Kratz passes the difference in her statistics to everyone else’s off as the product of a “negativity bias” that exists amongst humans at large. “Even when the DEI naysayers are small in number, their voices can be extremely disruptive to the rest of the people who still believe in it.” This was the line when Kratz entirely lost my sense of this source’s unbiased outlook. 

The programs look like they are dying out entirely but in reality, Catalina Colman was working in DEI jobs, and while she was searching for a new job relatively recently, the positions would get eliminated “midway through the interview process,” she says to NPR.

Perhaps, though, the programs are being absorbed rather than obliterated. The New York Times chalked the slide in DEI policies up to disguise. Companies are putting the same ideologies and positions under different guises and in different sections of their organizations. Essentially, a massive rebranding is taking place, and all of the work to restore diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace is being done through a different approach. For example, a program designed for furthering the success of black men in the workplace would instead become much broader and vaguer, at least in title.

All-in-all, this article is boring, but if you want an absolutely wild ride alongside a certified DEI expert, go watch “Am I Racist” and learn more about what DEI programs can look like.