The current state of DEI is coming under increasing criticism; for too much emphasis on social justice; for being overly influenced by identity politics; for its lack of business focus; for its tendency toward groupthink; and for its authoritarian stance on beliefs which stifles employees into silence. Many wise and experienced consultants have dropped the DEI from their work titles preferring to use organisational behaviour, leadership and culture instead.
Language and definitions
In the UK, more than in Europe, we import US ideas and language when it comes to this topic despite having completely different histories of oppression and discrimination. A shift in language may reflect a shift in approach, a gear change, welcome at times of diversity fatigue. When I started out in this sector in the 1990’s it was called equal opportunities or sometimes equality. Then came diversity which was considered more business friendly and less legalistic. This didn’t happen without some debate. Many were concerned that putting all the inequalities under one umbrella and calling it diversity would mean that some groups would lose out – disability particularly. Some noted that the word diversity merely meant difference and conveyed no element of power or inequality. Others felt that gender shouldn’t be considered as a part of diversity given that women are half the population. Inclusion (culture focused) was added to suggest that acknowledging difference wasn’t enough, everyone had to made to feel included. The turn to diversity was embraced by the corporate world, although key organisational issues like the gender pay gap and sexual harassment do not sit happily under its umbrella. Ultimately organisations still have to have an eye on equality and discrimination law. More recently the concept of equity has been adopted by UK organisations with very little debate and so we now have DEI – Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
Criticism
A lot of the criticism of DEI is coming from ‘the freedom of speech’ corner writers like Douglas Murray. The Free Speech Union published a report on how EDI was crippling British business.Many DEI specialists have dismissed these criticisms as ‘right wing’ attacks. However there are a few others like myself who have a lot of experience in the sector and know something is wrong. And we are anxious, unlike Murray et al, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is some really good DEI work that produces tangible benefits to organisations which have been overshadowed by reports of compelled pronouns in emails, prohibiting debate and free speech, endless months and weeks devoted to specific groups and other performative practices which can alienate many employees.
Earlier this year Kemi Badenoch and her team at the Equalities Office published a report called Inclusion at Work which was critical of a lot of the sector whilst acknowledging that work on diversity and inclusion remained important but must be tied more closely to the business. You can find a summary of its recommendations here. This report should have been widely debated by internal and external DEI consultants and managers. Instead it was met with a stony silence or hostility.
Last month the incoming CEO Nick McClelland of a leading diversity consultancy, Byrne Dean, acknowledged that there was ‘a growing disillusionment with EDI and even somewhat of a counter movement resisting it’. He believes that the disillusionment is because of a gap between pledges and tangible outcomes and says that there ‘must be a core business strategy to work’. I and others think that there is something rather more than disillusionment and lack of outcomes that is creating a backlash. But even the business case argument is being challenged and the popularity of mass unconscious bias training has been on the wane for a while now. There have been several articles written about the failure of diversity policies.
How did we get here? Too much focus on social justice?
Following the financial crash of 2007/8 large US corporates began emphasising their commitment to ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) and a broader concept of stakeholder (stakeholder capitalism) in order to shift the criticism they were receiving about profit and greed. Investment firms began to insist on ESG requirements from their investments. UK firms followed suit. Strong lobby groups rode this crest and public and private organisations began to sign up to a broader approach to business which encompassed care for the environment and social inequalities. DEI is very much the S in ESG. So diversity and inclusion, once a rather neglected marginalised department of often one part time employee was given far more recognition. Whilst social justice had always been an element of diversity and inclusion, it took on much more importance. It is only now fifteen years on that some people have begun to see ESG as something of a distraction from profitability and the return to shareholders.
DEI as a central tenet of ESG is caught in this backlash. Some companies have found that not all their customers agree with some of the causes that they are promoting e.g.Bud Light’s sales fell between 11 and 26% in the month after a partnership with a transgender influencer, and the brand lost its status as the top-selling beer. And only last week Ford announced it was scaling back its DEI policies following on from a number of other US companies.
Organisations used to limit their diversity efforts to what was achievable, legal and appropriate for their business. They could be ahead of the law in terms of giving more generous maternity leave provisions or have more extensive flexible working practices but they never suggested their role was to be agents of social change. Today identity politics and social justice theory including critical race theory, transgender ideology, intersectionality, colonialism and the concept of privilege have escaped the confines of the university campuses and have seeped into organisations under the umbrella of equity. Flags are waved at marches and on websites.
The turn to equity
As mentioned above there has been very little debate about the use of the term equity to replace equality. Indeed when searching for material all I could find were articles explaining why equity was a much more appropriate term to use than equality. Leading diversity consultancy Pearn Kandola published an article last year called Why Leaders Should Lead With Equity (Not Equality)
To explain the difference the author gives us the image of running a race, with equality as the finish line. “But equity recognises that not everyone starts in the same place. Equity is about adjusting the starting line so we can all run a fair race.”
Equal opportunities also recognised that not everyone started in the same place – hence its name – and also that organisations were biased towards white males. Companies serious about diversity and equality have been assessing their recruitment and appraisal processes for bias years before the word equity appeared. The Pearn Kandola article begins with a quote from Kimberle Crenshaw on intersectionality – a term not widely understood, contested as a theoretical tool and which certainly has limits in any practical application.
McKinsey has also published on the preference for equity over equality:
“Equity refers to fair treatment for all people, so that the norms, practices, and policies in place ensure identity is not predictive of opportunities or workplace outcomes.” (The Equality Act protects nine characteristics. There is no mention of the word identity) It continues “Equity differs from equality in a subtle but important way. While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal.” The whole point of diversity was that it recognised difference. This isn’t new. What is new is that we now refer to identity and privilege and there is a hierarchy. But who makes the judgements of relative advantage between individuals and groups (by virtue of their characteristics)? The DEI manager? Which characteristics count? And do some more than others? What treatment should be applied to whom? These decisions are fraught with problems and can lead both to alienation of the dominant employee group and also antagonise those who do not want ‘preferential treatment’ due to a particular characteristic.
There is a limit to how much organisations can do to iron out social disadvantage. Some would argue it is beyond their remit. Ultimately companies have to obey the law. There are no equity laws, only equality laws. The culture of progressive politics and the power of lobby groups has led many organisations to inadvertently enact policies out of line with the law.
Groupthink and cancellation
Another criticism of DEI is that it has resulted in groupthink, the opposite of what true diversity strives for. Simon Fanshawe OBE, one of the original founders of Stonewall and now very critical of it, discusses the impact of identity politics on the diversity and inclusion industry in his excellent book The Power of Difference and is well aware that there has been a growing tendency in this industry to have ‘right’ answers with which everyone must agree. ‘it is a peculiar feature of modern identity politics that the struggle for diversity is too often matched by a demand for rigid conformity.’
And what has happened he suggests is that ‘the nobility of those causes has sometimes given rise to mantras that mask the complexity that needs to be understood to significantly improve those responses’.
We need to have difficult discussions and we can live with productive disagreement rather than agreement. We aren’t seeing these encouraged. Instead employees are told what are the right views and language to adopt, often by politically motivated lobby groups and activist employee groups in very poor ‘training’ sessions. And they are punished if they do not agree either by being shamed, cancelled or sacked. There is now a growing number of very public tribunal cases, following the Forstater case which ruled that gender critical beliefs were legal, brought by employees who have been dismissed due to their views on biological sex. No wonder DEI is getting a bad name!
It is time for a reckoning. Those in the sector must acknowledge what has gone wrong and fix it or the reputation of DEI, EDI, D&I Diversity and Inclusion or whatever you want to call it will be damaged irrepairably.