The DEI Industry Needs to Check Its Privilege
The worst of the industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive.
By Conor Friedersdorf
The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.
The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.
Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.
The Harvard Business Review sums it up well.
Despite the increase in organizations adopting DEI initiatives and the proliferation of DEI firms and practitioners, the big, poorly kept secret is that the majority of these initiatives are less effective than many make them out to be. On the one hand, there is a lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners. And on the other, organizations keep asking for, and funding, interventions that don’t work. This phenomenon that purports to end inequity but instead sustains it at great cost to marginalized populations is called the DEI-Industrial Complex. To end it, the author, a DEI practitioner, provides four actions for organizations and DEI practitioners to take: 1) Identify DEI challenges before prescribing DEI solutions, 2) find the right specialist(s), 3) measure not only inputs, but outcomes, and 4) have those doing the work inform the budget for it.
“Equal Opportunity Employer” appears on almost all job sites and recruiter information, and has become a meaningless trope.
Unconscious bias training rarely changes actual behaviors and has little impact on explicit biases. A meta-analysis of hundreds of prejudice-reduction interventions found few that unambiguously achieved their goals. Many popular interventions run the risk of backlash, strong adverse reactions that sustain or even worsen the inequity that practitioners attempt to eliminate. Even “the business case for diversity,” a decades-old rhetorical framing and justification for DEI work, has been found to backfire on marginalized groups’ feelings of belonging and weaken support for diversity programs when organizational performance drops.
Much of the problem rests with the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners. Few of us measure the effectiveness of our interventions, and while there are many players in the DEI certification space, there’s little agreement on what actual skills and competencies are necessary to become a “good” practitioner.
The other major contributor is that organizations keep asking us for, and funding, interventions that don’t work.
If the organization is interested in undertaking DEI efforts, it should start by identifying the challenges such efforts intend to solve, so that it can match the right solutions with the right challenges. A bystander intervention training makes more sense if employees aren’t speaking up when they witness discrimination. A leadership coaching engagement can be tailored to focus on respectful communication and emotional intelligence if the organization knows that leaders require support in these categories. To arrive at these conclusions, your organization should start by listening and learning through DEI audits, employee surveys, focus groups, and other interventions that collect valuable data required to take effective action, including disaggregated demographic data.
The Medical-DEI-Industrial Complex will persist so long as there are corporations that care more about going through the motions than eliminating inequity and effecting actual change, as well as practitioners that find this acceptable. But leaders of organizations who want better can drive a higher standard for DEI work in how they interface with the industry and its practitioners, to seek out and engage in work that works.
The DEI caveats extend to healthcare, medicine and School of Medicine, nursing and allied health providers. The high standards for admission to medical schools adds another layer of exclusion and inequality. In medicine it is of particular importance because these occupations have life and death issues when it pertains to patient welfare.
Must medical schools already seek out a group of underprivileged or a quota of multiracial, LGBT, or transgender applicants? Even unscreened there are LGBTQ or transgender applicants who have not ‘come out”.
On many forms there is now a new field to fill in, identifying male, female, non-binary, prefer not to say. These fields seem to just be there for statistical purposes and serve no real purpose in a selection process.
Anyone who fills out gender portions would be smart to enter refuse to say. Of course those who screen applicants will assign that category, right or wrong, to one of the other choices. The question is non productive.
I agree, thanks for sending it to me. Sort of weird we were both writing about this. Great minds think alike...
Gary, You may be interested in this essay I wrote for Authentic Medicine. Ken https://authenticmedicine.com/2023/05/dei-and-stanfords-law-school/