I work in HR, and DEI has been a trend in my profession for the last few years even before it became a political issue.
Strictly speaking this isn’t really true. HR has been working to protect the company from liability due to discrimination long before DEI was in anyone’s lexicon. I’ve got plenty of anecdotes, but I’m going to be as brief as I can. One of the reasons DEI is a hot topic is because companies want to maintain a high level of employee engagement. Employee engagement is the degree to which a an employee gives a damn about their job and the company. Low engagement with employees is associated with high rates of turnover and low productivity and it’s generally thought to be in the best interest of the company to work for high engagement.
You might ask yourself, what does DEI have to do with engagement? Part of it is to make sure employees feel like they belong. That they fit in. When Bob from accounting comes back from his cruise with his husband we don’t want him to feel as though he has to lie and pretend like he just went with some buddies. We don’t want Rita to feel she’s treated any differently because she wears her hair in a natural style. While related, not all of these issues rise to the level of discrimination.
We did a survey a few years back, and one of the complaints was the promotion process was opaque. Nobody on the survey accused the company of discrimination, but they didn’t really understand the process which left doubts that bothered them. I myself experienced this a few years back when I started to wonder if my age prevented me from getting a promotion. So we made the process a bit more transparent making sure employees undertsood criteria for selecting candidates for interview and the educational/experience requirements for the position. We also removed the ability of hiring managers to see the names of people who have applied for the position (you apply for promotions at my company). We did this a few year ago, so next time we have a survey we’ll see if its made a difference.
At least at my company, our DEI efforts aren’t about avoiding discrimination suits. I’m happy to say management is pretty good about not doing stupid stuff that’s likely to get us sued. It’s more about engagement. We want to attract new talent and retain the talent we’ve already got.