The DEI Debate, Demystified

“DEI must DIE,” tweeted celebrity CEO Elon Musk. “The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.” That a member of the white billionaire class would attempt to leverage his outsized social influence to call for the end of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives is unsurprising. Musk has been linked to the so-called Great Replacement Theory, a white supremacist conspiracy which accuses, primarily, Jewish people and liberal elites of strategically decreasing the white population through mass immigration and interracial marriage. That a member of the white billionaire class sees himself existing in opposition to “social elites” reveals both the inherent illogic of prejudice, and the insidiousness of fictive kinship between virtue-signaling oligarchs and their working-class faithful.?

Is DEI actually dying? Between 2019 and 2020, job postings for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion-related roles rose 56%, per indeed. Through 2022, Chief Diversity Officer positions were hired at an increase of over 100% from previous years, per LinkedIn. 2023, however, saw sharp reversal. Set against the backdrop of mass layoffs across the corporate sector (up 200% from the previous year, per Forbes), DEI Professionals are struggling. Job postings for related positions are down 20%, Big Tech Tastemakers like Meta and Google are culling their inclusion initiatives, and debate about whether or not the function deserves to exist at all is unrelenting across social media. Elon Musk-run X, formerly known as Twitter, cut its DEI staff from 30 to 2 after making promising strides in Black and Latin-American Hispanic talent recruitment the year before. Christopher Rufo, the prominent conservative activist known for social media crusades against Critical Race Theory and former Harvard University President Claudine Gay, has gone on record with the goal of eliminating DEI in “every institution in America.”

How did we get here? We never actually left.?

The American relationship to social justice work has always been both vacillatory and fraught with controversy. Whether through the lens of race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sex, the intersectionality thereof, or some other measure, the targeted subversion of social progression is as American as the promise of progression itself.?

Reconstruction begat Jim Crow; President Obama begat President Trump. The message, clear and codified, has not changed: if you push for social progress, we will push back. Arguably, the explosion of both corporate and academic DEI functions assisted the explosion of far-right extremism’s interest and intrusion into mainstream US corporate culture, thanks in part to public figures like Musk. Despite what he may want you to believe, DEI does not need to die. It does, however, need to adapt to changing times. The fervor of 2020 has been replaced with the political skepticism of 2023, and if DEI is to survive 2024, it needs to button up.?

What do DEI Teams actually do? Proponents and critics alike seem equally misinformed, leading to the debate around the function being framed conceptually, rather than functionally.?

We survey and track employee demographic information, working across People Operations and Talent Acquisition to address demographic-specific disparities in hiring, pay, internal mobility, employee satisfaction, retention, and attrition rates. We audit and edit official company collateral, removing instances of unnecessarily gender-specific or ableist language (ex. “Parental” instead of “Maternity/Paternity”).?

We design and facilitate company-wide workshops on topics like unconscious bias, micro-aggressive behavior, and inclusive leadership, increasing employee wellbeing and promoting informed cross-cultural communication. We negotiate partnerships with organizations like AFROTECH , Out in Tech , and The Grace Hopper Program at Fullstack Academy , ensuring our employment opportunities are known even to “nontraditional” candidates, strengthening talent branding initiatives. We craft the talking points Executives use to speak to controversial topics, illuminating the realities their (typical) wealth and privilege protect them from grappling with on a day-to-day basis.

Who should be doing DEI work? There is the school of thought that believes lived experience is the greatest determinant of success in a DEI role: I have lived the life of a marginalized person, therefore I understand how organizations tend to fail them, and belong in this work. The second, more traditionalist approach, prioritizes professional experience: I have worked in People Operations/Talent Acquisition/Legal & Compliance/Learning & Development, therefore I understand how these functions operate, and belong in this work. Both schools of thought are wrong.?

Those with lived, but not professional, experience tend to self-style themselves as DEI Practitioners, and have the potential to run roughshod over the intricacies specific to the work itself; centering their experiences without the self-awareness or professional acumen necessary to navigate a job that is, at best, an emotional minefield. Those with professional, but not lived, experiences tend to default to the status-quo, lacking both the understanding of how that choice further perpetuates inequity at scale, and the wherewithal necessary to defuse or confront detractors.?

It is the combination of lived and professional experience that separates the effective from the ineffective; failure to understand this has led to a culture of mishiring and missed opportunities. While that is not specific to DEI Teams, those woefully unqualified for the work risk emotional and physical burnout, decreased feelings of psychological safety, and represent an existential threat to the function itself.

How should DEI work be done? Measurably, and with established Key Performance Indicators (KPIs.) The reason this conversation tends to feel more esoteric than necessary is the capitalistic urge to tie performance to revenue generation, regardless of context. Human Resources Business Partners are not measured on their ability to generate revenue; why is DEI? If DEI works across recruiting and talent brand, new hire demographic shifts over time should factor into whether or not it has been successful. If the company’s annual employee surveys cover feelings of inclusion, belonging, equity, and fairness in pay and/or mobility, demographic-specific response rates can speak to the effectiveness of DEI programming. If DEI is tasked with creating and facilitating company-wide training, participation and survey response rates, per workshop, are important metrics to track and analyze. Resist the urge to divorce data analysis from effective DEI; the two are not mutually exclusive.?

DEI is controversial because it seeks to renegotiate the corporate relationship to social privilege. Most are blissfully unaware that modern-day corporate design is directly based on the vicious efficiency of the plantation accounting system, its brutal legacy persisting into today’s DEI debate. There are Masters (Executives), Overseers (Middle-Managers), Slaves (Subordinate Workers), and sophisticated means of organizing, analyzing, and incentivizing each class, relative to their ability to produce. Why don’t Black people get hired? Why don’t women get promoted? Why are disabled people made invisible? Who’s trying to stop us from answering those questions, and what happens if they succeed??

If your organization is struggling with its approach to DEI, you’re not alone. The work can seem impossible, but it just requires strategy informed by data, fortified by context, and purposely invested in by leaders more committed to action than optics. I founded DD4 Consulting because I have seen the difference those leaders can make. Let’s work together.