Evidence Based?

At the end of last month the government published a Report on the Inclusion at Work Panel’s recommendations for improving diversity and inclusion (D&I) practice in the workplace, so here is what I hope business take away from it and what makes me concerned about this document.

Dr Steven Maxwell , a D&I and Wellbeing Consultant and Health researcher says:

“If you were to submit this report to a journal, it would be rejected, based on lack of scientific rigour.”

What I hope businesses take away from the document -?

The report sits on a very reasonable foundation. Its main point is that we should be doing D&I strategy and interventions based on evidence of need and efficacy, that we should iteratively measure and investigate the impact of those strategies and interventions, as every business ecosystem is unique and dependent on a plethora of parameters - chef’s kiss - perfect, yes!?

“they should take care to design any D&I strategy in a way that allows for ongoing scrutiny and embeds regular review and evaluation of impact.”

And additionally -?

“McKinsey and Companies’ analysis[footnote 19] based on work with hundreds of companies seeking to launch or transform ‘DEI strategies’ also identifies poor data gathering as a common reason for the failure of those strategies. Their research shows that companies which have begun to fulfil their D&I commitments take a systematic approach where they first use quantitative and qualitative analytics to establish a baseline before determining what interventions are most needed”

I can’t agree more. D&I practice is relatively young and another thing we can all agree on, it is complex. I am quite adamant, that it is NOT complicated as theory, but it is indeed complex. As someone who has been educated in and practiced design, to me the most obvious approach has always been this - careful and systemic measurement and method testing with iteration - design thinking 101.?

Since I have started working in D&I, I feel like this has been my crusade. Every time a client approaches me and they request a service from me, my proposal is to investigate what is needed. The next step is to integrate an iterative method of measurement of the impact in the short and long term, with built-in ways of collecting and implementing any learning from that impact.?

Yes, this has always been my approach, but in my experience, this is where we hit the roadblock - it is not up to me to define if this methodology will be accepted. Who carries this responsibility then? Here we arrive at what concerns me about this report.?

The issues with the report -?

There are three main themes which erode the credibility of this report -?

Firstly, there is an obvious bias towards business profits built on an overwhelming lack of power awareness with whiffs of white fragility, which does not a national government befit - I expect my government to prioritise people, I have a feeling business is sufficiently concerned with its bottom line.?

Secondly, the re-focusing on “merit” and a suggestion, that we have indeed previously had a better level of both skills and inclusion in the workplace.?

And lastly, but one of the biggest and most easily detectable issues - for a report with a focus on evidence and objective investigation, the holes are glaring. Sweeping statements with no citations to them along with basing whole arguments on individual cases which have been blown up by media, but this report does not bother to explain why they should carry such weight.?

In Defence of Business

The entire piece seems to be written in defence of business and with an air of suggesting that D&I practitioners are the ones to blame for not working this way so far.

It’s always important to ask what is missing. Two vital terms have not been mentioned at all in this report, which in my mind heavily erodes its credibility. They never use the term “intersectionality” and they never discuss “power dynamics”.?

So let’s look at power dynamics and why they are crucial for the understanding of D&I practice. Well, it is simple - to exclude or include, you must have power; to initiate inclusion practice, you must have power. And who has the power when it comes to what is done in an organisation - whoever holds the purse strings? D&I practitioners, whether internal or external consultants, can propose the most amazing strategies, but when the boss shaves all the meaningful action away from that and only pulls the performative, what are we meant to do? Of course, I can only share my experience, but if the government is investing in producing a report like this, shouldn't they work a little bit harder on identifying WHO they are advising? There is no data or discussion around decision-making power and power dynamics in decisions about D&I strategies and practices in the report at all. So who is the government talking to? Who are they inspiring to take responsibility and accountability?

“We believe that, while employers have a duty to fully grasp and apply the law, leaders and managers should not be expected to possess a sophisticated knowledge of the demographic, historical, and socio-economic debates relating to the relative advantage and disadvantages between groups. Nor, crucially, should they outsource or delegate this to those with potentially conflicting incentives. ”

Well, looking at the quote above, it seems that the government is giving business leaders with power permission for ignorance. We all live in the same world, and while, obviously, nobody can know everything, maybe, the more power you have the more responsibility for awareness and safeguarding one should have. The one thing that I thought was obvious, is that the accountability for exclusion, discrimination, and oppression lies with the more powerful.?

The committed defence to business is shown throughout the report -?

“Decisions about D&I should be rooted in evidence as far as possible and be context-specific, rather than be based on abstract, social-theoretical, definitions of privilege and disadvantage.”

While I absolutely agree with the first part of this statement, in the second one, we can clearly feel the withdrawal of what is right and the affirmation that if it is about making more money for this specific company we are a-OK. This expression? - “abstract, social-theoretical, definitions of privilege and disadvantage” sat with me for a few days, and it makes me so uncomfortable. It could easily slip through the cracks, as a throwaway line on how D&I stuff is vague and complicated, but what I am hearing here is let’s forget about that li'l thing called racism, all the clearly recorded history of it, and evidence of its continual impact on people’s lives, let’s set aside all the evidence and reporting on the systemic injustice across our public services and society - pfft those things are too abstract and theoretical, but hey, if you find something that bumps the Q1 numbers, sure, we can get on board with that.?

And in the same line of thought, they also say -?

“It allows organisations to identify context-specific problems within their own organisation, rather than assuming that society-wide inequalities are present.”

This is almost funny - organisations are made up of people from society, we know how bias works, nobody is immune, organisations which don’t reflect society-wide inequalities, well the only way in which I can imagine those would be that they are organisations which DO NOT REPRESENT this society, and bam we have returned at the premises of any D&I intervention.?

The defence of business in my eyes is the thinly veiled defence of white fragility. The following citation makes that quite obvious -?

“Even the most well-intentioned D&I initiatives have unintended consequences, and are rarely neutral in design. …

(Of course, they are not neutral in design - they are meant to correct a lack of balance!)

…When D&I ‘goes wrong’ the cost to organisations can be considerable, in resources and reputation. A recent academic paper titled ‘How to prevent and minimise DEI backfire’[footnote 51] cites examples including a divisive Coca Cola diversity training activity suggesting employees should try to be ‘less white’ which drew significant negative media attention,[footnote 52]”

That Coca-Cola training was in association with u, author of White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism, a book trying to bring to light the challenges of speaking truth to power, more specifically truth about oppression to people with white privilege, I can hardly pen anything better here. What we must acknowledge, however, is that if any address of whiteness warrants a reaction like that, carried on the power of privilege, well, we certainly still very much have a problem.?

Merit and the Good Ol’ Times

The introduction article on the government website and some aspects of the report insist that the goal of this endeavour is to return focus to “merit”. I am tired of explaining how biased and dependent on privilege merit is. This comic strip does a great job.?

Business and Trade Secretary and Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch, said:

“[...]This government wants to ensure employers are doing EDI in a way that doesn’t undermine meritocracy”

I would argue EDI efforts should undermine meritocracy because meritocracy is based on privilege. If we are trying to address systemic issues, we need to investigate the system, right, and merit is a fundamental part of the system. Merit is often granted on a homogenous understanding of skill and achievement, usually only developed behind a paywall.?

One of the criteria identified for embedding evidence-informed practice is titled:?

“Criteria 5: Restoring the importance of clear performance standards, high quality vocational training, and excellent management, as the most effective means to improve equality of opportunity, inclusion and belonging”

“Restoring”? This almost sounds as if the authors believe there was a time passed in which we had better diversity and inclusion in the workplace and that, frankly terrifies me.?

Evidence Based?

And we finally arrive at the “the cobbler’s children go barefoot” moment. While seemingly obsessed with evidence, measurement, and assessment, the report does not seem to hold itself to the same standards.

The report seems to base a lot of its concerns on a couple of recent cases where plaintiffs won over D&I practices that violated their rights to a belief, without putting them in any context, or highlighting why those few cases hold such importance -?

“Recent high profile cases expose employers misinterpreting and misapplying equality legislation, leading to several landmark rulings. This primarily relates to employers’ interpretation of philosophical beliefs under the Equality Act 2010, as well as the positive action provisions of the Act. In addition to those cited above, the Forstater v CGD Europe and others tribunal[footnote 58] awarded over ￡100,000 in compensation for injury to feelings and aggravated damages, ruling that Maya Forstater’s employer had discriminated against her because of her ‘gender-critical’ beliefs – beliefs that the ruling confirmed were protected under the Act. Similarly, in what is believed to be a legal first in the UK, employment judge Kirsty Ayre ruled in 2023 that holding a view that does not subscribe to critical race theory is a protected characteristic under the “religion or belief” section of the Equality Act.[footnote 59]”

What percentage of tribunals fall under these topics? How relevant are those cases? If something has been magnified and polarised in media in the wild culture war against trans people and RCT, why can’t we expect our government to look at the cases objectively and provide us evidence for the real trends and not what is simply trendy? None of that data is there in the report, but the settlement amounts are repeated loud and clear multiple times, to ensure that businesses are terrified of doing something wrong in the context of the Equality Act.??

If the law was absolute and fully covered every possible case in the existing texts, then lawyers and judges would be out of work, and last time I checked, they seemed pretty rammed! Liberty is also a complex concept - individual liberty extends to the space where it starts to encroach on another individual liberty, right? But where is that? I have the right to my beliefs, but I certainly do not have the right to harm other people based on that, right? But then what is harm? Could expressing my views verbally be harmful? And here is where we enter the zone of litigation. There naturally will be an organic number of occasions where everyday people will misinterpret the above. Considering that there are 649,000 workplace tribunal cases per quarter in the UK (gov.uk), I certainly hope that the government is not gearing their advice based on 2. If they do, however, where is the explanation of their statistical significance? If we are talking about those cases, why don’t we talk about the Kevin Lister case ruling which gives us this clear distinction between protected beliefs, and actions that should face reprimand??

The references to the government's anti-trans agenda do not stop -?

“People talked about a ‘bullying’ or ‘oppressive’ response to expressing views that were deemed unpopular or raising opposition to certain beliefs and approaches to race and gender.”

What specifically? Where are the examples? In Bulgarian, there’s this expression “The thief is yelling “Catch the thief!””. If someone comes up to me and refuses to address me as I have requested and insists that I wouldn’t be granted equal rights because of how I wear my hair and clothes, and I ask them to stop, that is NOT “bullying” or “oppressive”, so surely they must mean something else, but alas, I can’t know, because the information is not there, just the gaslighting.?

Coming back to the lack of awareness of power - the report makes powerful statements, with no evidence reference to be found on them -?

“Both public and private sector representatives cited the data that white working-class populations were often more disadvantaged than ethnic minority groups, though this is rarely a priority in D&I interventions. ”

If they cited that data, and you decided to include their quotes in your report, with a mighty government stamp on it - where is that initial citation?

More big statements with huge potential to harm and no reference -?

“During our engagement, the Free Speech Union (FSU) – which supports and advises individuals who believe their right to free speech has been curtailed, often by their employer – told us of dozens of cases (past and present) involving potential misapplication of equalities law, and D&I practice employees deemed exclusionary or discriminatory.”

The contradictions simply do not end. After strongly insisting on the baselessness of D&I training, we come to this finding -?

“Senior leadership prioritising the transmission of their own knowledge and skills, and professional development, has a positive impact on an inclusive culture. ”

So how are they meant to do that without training?

Their Suggestion?

Finally, the report proposes a toolkit modelled after a teaching resource - https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/teaching-learning-toolkit. Which I do believe foundationally could be great. I can’t help but worry however what the methodology behind it will be based on this report.?

My Suggestion

Ultimately, what I can produce is much scientific evidence that when you bring different people together, our instincts are not ones of collaboration and ease.

Inclusion interventions are deeply needed for diverse teams to be able to harness the benefits of diversity. I want businesses to start looking at those as any other business improvement function - necessary, measured, recorded, and constantly improving.

But most importantly I would like to know that the people with power, may that be ruling power or great financial power become accountable for what is right, and not only what is profitable.

Most of all I want that to stop feeling like an impossible ask.