While Times Are Tough for DEI, Let's Not Back Down. Let's Double Down.

Last week I gave the opening keynote at the 任仕达 Business of Equity Mastermind Executive Summit. Representing Catalyst Inc. and gathering with?incredibly talented people dedicated to creating more equitable and inclusive workplaces was a wonderful experience. But on a personal level, this event really helped solidify the reasons I do this work.

By now, it is common knowledge that companies that fully embrace diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) reap a wealth of benefits. The focus of the event was, as the title suggests, the “business” side of equity. (Read for a nice summary by Randstad’s Vice President, Head of Community Impact J. Keith Brown ). And there is plenty of evidence to be had that investing in equity is good business.

Yet, as I said in my keynote (here’s a brief clip ), many of us have spent years trying to “prove” that DEI improves business performance, sharing the data doesn’t always move the needle. Tonya M. Matthews, Ph.D. , President and CEO of Charleston International African American Museum, shook me to my core several years ago during the height of COVID and the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, “Girl, if it were all about the numbers, we would have solved this problem a long time ago!”

The business case does matter. But what matters more to employees is communicating that creating a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is, simply, the right and fair thing to do. Catalyst found that three-quarters (76%) of employees across 11 countries surveyed in recent research agree that organizations should be actively engaged in efforts to create a diverse and equitable workplace. And 93% want to hear about this work from their leaders in detail. What’s more, when companies emphasize why DEI is the right thing to do, we increase employees’ feelings of inclusion and their intent to stay with their organizations.

Even so, there is vocal opposition to these efforts, especially here in the United States. Our study found that a full 24% of employees report that their organizations’ senior leaders never or rarely engage in discussions about diversity.

And what’s the result? Perhaps not surprising in this environment, the number of women in the highest echelons of leadership is sliding. A recent article in the Financial Times that I participated in pointed out that while there are more women on US company boards than ever, the number of women executives has fallen for the first time since 2005.

This is sobering news. But as Dr. Tonya Matthews so memorably pointed out, it’s more data. It reaches our heads, but not necessarily our hearts. What should reach our hearts is the human toll that’s exacted when societies allow inequity to get a foothold.

For example, at the Business of Equity Mastermind conference, Sander van 't Noordende , Randstad’s CEO, told me his mother had to quit her job in the 1950s in the Netherlands when she got married because that was the law. Another fact that came up: women in the US could not get a credit card before 1972 without their husband as the co-signer. What did unmarried women do? What did gay women do?

So, my rallying cry in my speech was this: While things are hard, we must forge ahead. When the pendulum swings, we must ensure it doesn't swing as far back as it was in the not-so-distant past. Companies committed to building diverse, equitable, inclusive workplaces are not backing down, they are doubling down. The work continues, even if in different forms and with less broadcasting.

I get that being an advocate for workplace equity is not always easy. But we can do hard things. We can do the right things. The stakes are too high not to.