What Is "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion", and Is It a Good Thing?

Great Debates
21

In this case this looks a lot like how the right turned CRT into a caricature, the important thing there was to realize that the right willfully ignored how CRT was a frame work and how minority researchers also did and do use it to investigate their own issues of bigotry among their ancestral locales. There was also some definitions that were made to mislead what they were all about.

In this case one should not ignore how the DEI teachers explain the definitions they use, it follows that you then go for secondary sources that misinterpret what they do, or go for past meanings in the attempt to make them sound silly. Like with the CRT proponents, I did bother to check what the proponents of DEI are talking about, and well, it is not really helpful to ignore what they do talk about.

From the DEI training I got:

It’s important to understand the distinction between equality and equity. Equality would mean giving each and every person the same thing as a show of fairness, but when it comes to best practices and inclusion, this is not a sufficiently informed solution. Equity is about giving people whatever they need to be on equal footing. For instance, a person with a disability may need specific accommodations that other employees don’t. Dedicating resources for things like noise canceling headphones for folks who are neurodivergent, signals that equity is not just a value, it’s a priority. Any social identity group that has historically had their opportunities and access limited may need extra support to advance in a culture where other groups have had decades of education and work opportunities to build their access to professional networks.

– Dereca Blackmon
Stanford University
BA, History. Inclusion Innovator.

22

But the distinction between equal opportunity vs equal outcome is extremely blurred. Truely equal outcomes for everyone would never work and has never been attempted, save in allegorical fiction.

The real question is how equal to make the opportunity. Take the standard baseball field meme. From one point of view in the first case no one is prevented from coming to the side of the field with all the boxes they can carry so they all have equal opportunity, the fact that certain people can’t carry enough boxes to see over the top of the fence is just due to their lack of ability. But if we were to make is so that short people got more boxes that would be enforcing equal outcomes. On the other hand, one could say that what was important was that all people had equal opportunity to watch the game, in which case the first case would not be equal opportunity but the second version wouldn’t. But there might not be equality of outcomes if the outcomes was say writing a sports column about the game.

Similarly one could argue that allowing all students regardless of race to interview with a wealthy white allumnus is giving equal opportunity to everyone, and the fact white alumnus’ although not racists do generally have more of a connection connection with certain students who share their background than with others is a question of the ability of that student to make a good impression. Or one might say that equality of opportunity extend to being similarly likely to pass the interview process regardless of race. Is that equality of opportunity or of outcome?

23

I don’t know exactly what “equity” is, except that it’s the part of my house that I own. The bank owns the other part until I pay off the mortgage, at which point, my equity is my house.

More seriously, I worked for the province of Ontario, back in the day, in an agency of the Ontario Ministry of Health. Somebody somewhere in the provincial government got a burr under their saddle about “employment equity” or “pay equity” or somesuch. Basically, the idea was that women should be paid the same as men, for doing the same job. Sounds good so far, right; and I have no problem with that.

Implementation became a clusterflop. It’s easy to compare the tasks of a male file clerk to a female file clerk, but when you get to more specialized tasks, such as “software coder” vs. “quality assurance checker,” how do you draw the line? Especially when the software coder is a man, a brown Muslim to whom English is a second language, and the quality assurance checker is a white woman who only speaks English? And she makes more than he does to begin with?

In my case, as a technical writer, I was classified as “equal to an administrative assistant,” or in other words, I was regarded as a secretary. No, I was a professional technical writer; I could write and design books, which secretaries cannot do. I studied typography, at community colleges, in order to design books, unlike secretaries. I could not take dictation, and could not type to secretarial standards, but after the government of Ontario’s “employment equity” push, I was regarded as “just a secretary” by the government of Ontario. It was insulting, and it was wrong.

I left shortly after. Ever since, “employment equity” means “You get screwed” to me.

There’s a reason I went to law school. Because no client of mine has ever wondered about anything else beyond what they have before the court. “So you’re a lawyer and you’re white, hetero, male? Meh, big deal; how can you get me off this DUI?”

24

I’m sure you’re going to get pushback on this but I totally see where you’re coming from and I’m inclined to agree with you.

To quote from @GIGObuster’s DEI training:

Equity is about giving people whatever they need to be on equal footing. For instance, a person with a disability may need specific accommodations that other employees don’t. Dedicating resources for things like noise canceling headphones for folks who are neurodivergent, signals that equity is not just a value, it’s a priority.

I’m not quite sure what that last phrase is supposed to mean, but sure, in general I fully concur with that. But that sounds to me like just being a decent employer, and beyond that, just being a decent person.

But she doesn’t stop there. The writer then says this:

Any social identity group that has historically had their opportunities and access limited may need extra support to advance in a culture where other groups have had decades of education and work opportunities to build their access to professional networks.

This is where we really get into the weeds. This is where the concept of social engineering starts to rear its ugly head. Earlier @Kimstu said ““Equal” implies that everybody’s getting exactly the same, while “equitable” implies that everybody’s getting whatever allocated amount is most fair overall in a given situation”. The problem – and the peril – here is that although the principle is clear, the word “fair” is very fluid and subjective – fairness is entirely in the eye of the beholder.

“DEI” is a fine and noble aspiration that I have no problem with in principle. What I have a problem with is that it’s become a catchphrase and popular initialism, and that way lies peril. “Affirmative action” is a great example of the peril of a popular catchphrase. It first appeared in an executive order from JFK in 1961 that required federal contractors to ensure that job applicants were employed “without regard to their race, creed, color or national origin”. Who but a racist could possibly have a problem with that?

But then, in 1969, Nixon’s “Philadelphia Plan” turned that catchphrase into a specific demand for quotas for minority hiring. That’s when it started to become contentious, and by the time it morphed into admission quotas for elite universities, it was clear that this well-intentioned catchphrase had created a monster.

JFK’s first use of the term “affirmative action” was entirely laudable and beneficent. What it eventually turned into as social policy was not. I have the same fears about DEI. Well-intentioned principles tend to become perverted when turned into bureaucratic policy. The principles of DEI should be a natural, organic part of an organizational culture, not a mandate or political virtue-signal.

25

Funnily enough I’ve just had our latest round of DEI training at work, which says “Equity is the process of ensuring that practices and programmes are impartial, fair and provide equal possible outcomes for every individual.”

The word “possible” is extremely important there. The point is not that equal outcomes will be achieved but that they can be achieved, and that obstacles are removed and support given as needed.

26

LOL at the notion that as a lawyer, your being a cishet white man has no impact on how you’re perceived or treated by your clients or in the courtroom. :rofl:

27

I’m not in compensation, and it’s my weakest area, but this has nothing to do with DEI and everything to do with how your employer classified jobs and their pay grades. I don’t know anything about Ontario, but I know the state of Arkansas is wonky about their pay and how they classify jobs. A few years back I looked at one of their entry level HR positions and it paid $22,000 a year. A similar entry level HR position at my company paid $35,000 a year.

28

Certainly there are some companies and other institutions for whom DEI is just a buzzword, or something that they do just to try to avoid getting sued, but that’s not always the case. There are also plenty of institutions who see it as a good thing in its own right, and strive to achieve it for that reason. Not everything is about profits.

In particular, there are some categories of diversity for which there isn’t equal-protection legislation, but which some institutions strive for, anyway. For instance, socioeconomic diversity. It’s completely legal for a private school, for instance, to have policies that favor the economically-advantaged. In fact, it’s nearly inevitable, since charging tuition is such a policy. And yet, the private school I work for prides itself on its relatively high (compared to other private schools) level of economic diversity, and strives to increase it even further. It’s hard, of course, because we have to then find other sources of funding, but we do it anyway because we think it’s worthwhile.

29

Anyone with any experience in the real world knows that training by itself is useless. Training is a cheap way for management who doesn’t care make it look like they are doing something. I’m sure those people at Boeing who didn’t bolt the panel to the plane got trained in quality. But if their bosses rated them on getting the stuff out the door, and showed that they didn’t care if steps were missed, the training would do no good.
The company I used to work for was always in trouble with the government for ripping them off. Justifiably so. I took training on how to interact with the government. Their problems were never mentioned, a competitor was used as a bad example. The message was very clear.If your goal is to obey the law, then measuring how well you do and taking steps to fix problems is the answer. If your goal is to look like you care about not breaking the law, just training works great.

BTW, no training I’ve ever had said that the outcomes for every person should be equal, except perhaps to not that this is not what the outcome was expected to be.

The reason for this is not that Nixon was woke, but that we found that once we more or less ended blatant discrimination it did not end more subtle discrimination. Easy to say that we give each person we interview an equal shot, but if you structure your university visits to never go to colleges with high minority populations you are going to have an unbalanced candidate base. How can you tell unless you measure, and what good is measuring unless there is some accountability? Unless you think the worst person you hire from the old base is better than the best person you can hire from the expanded base, you should support this.

30

And if black clients look at this white lawyer and think, possibly with good reason, that this guy isn’t going to fight for them as hard as he might a a white client with 2 kids and home in the suburbs?

31

Besides what @Odesio , @Chronos and @Voyager said, The issue here is that a lot of what is being said (and mostly from the right wing media) is not what DEI is about, there is also the evidence that a lot of what Equity and Equality is talked about is not a binding thing. And what is fair can be measured. As this company that was pointed out in the research mentioned already, found out:

How Salesforce Closed the Pay Gap Between Men and Women | WIRED

In the months that followed, I began to speak out about pay equality—everywhere from a dinner at the Los Angeles home of actress Patricia Arquette to an innovation summit in Tokyo to the White House. So you can imagine my astonishment and, to be honest, embarrassment, when Cindy came to see me again.

One year after conducting our first audit, we’d run the numbers again. Turned out we needed to spend another $3 million adjusting the salaries of employees whose compensation had fallen out of whack since the last audit. “How can this be?” I asked.

It gave me some relief to discover that these figures were largely a consequence of growth. We’d recently gotten about 17 percent bigger after buying two dozen companies, and it turned out that in the process we hadn’t just inherited their technology but their pay practices and culture, too.

Realizing that this had the potential to become a recurring problem, we decided to take more stringent measures. We devised a new set of job codes and standards and applied them to each newly integrated company, to make sure everyone performing similar work was similarly compensated from day one. From there, the Employee Success team began reviewing merit increases, bonuses, stock grants, and promotions to root out disparities there, too.

Equalizing pay wasn’t an easy process, or a cheap one: After our third pay assessment, we’d spent a total of $8.7 million addressing differences in pay based on gender, race, and ethnicity.

But it has already begun to pay off in incalculable ways, and its benefits will continue to accrue for years. Already, our commitment to equality has helped land us the number one spot on Fortune’s list of best companies to work for, as well as the top spot on People magazine’s list of “Companies That Care” two years in a row. And it has contributed to our ability to attract the very best and brightest talent in the country.

As even @Dr.Strangelove pointed out, sure, sometimes this does not work depending on what the executives or a majority in the company do with the info. That, though, is actually pointing at the problem and in the end: not asking the corporations to do anything, DEI is just a part of the effort to deal with many issues, even gender inequity. And the concerning thing here is that the talking points from the right are just geared to even get rid of any remaining non-binding efforts at justice that are being made.

32

I suppose that client can seek representation elsewhere. Generally speaking, race isn’t a bonafide qualification and an employer can’t just choose a black lawyer over a white one because clients might prefer it that way.

33

Well over the last several decades they seem to have been doing a pretty good job of hiring white lawyers over black lawyers for a variety of reasons, and not necessarily for out and out racist reason, but just because they subconsciously “seem more professional and personable” to the white people who are making the hiring decisions. Mainly though, I was just pointing out an example of why a diverse work environment might be good for a company.

34

In the general case, no, regardless of the benefits of DEI – which I think most of us can agree with – that statement is absolutely false. The story you cite talks about salary disparities and other cultural differences due to a company’s acquisition of two dozen smaller companies. Obviously it makes good sense and is fair to standardize salaries and benefits across the whole organization so that everyone receives similar compensation for similar work. That’s equality, not equity, and is just a matter of consistent policy and simple arithmetic.

The problem arises with social engineering schemes that have either explicitly mandated or implied quotas that give preferential treatment to groups that (to quote from your previous post) “need extra support to advance in a culture where other groups have had decades of education and work opportunities to build their access to professional networks.”

For purposes of discussion let’s consider the situation of White Guy (WG) and Minority Person (MP). If both are candidates for the same job or the same promotion, what does DEI tell us about which one should be hired or promoted? If there’s a fancy conference at some exotic locale and the organization can only afford to send one of either WG or MP, what does DEI tell us about who to send, given the need for “extra support to advance in a culture where other groups have had decades of education and work opportunities”?

How is it fair to WG if MP gets preference in these situations? I’m not saying it’s necessarily wrong, but how do you judge “fairness” here? And what about the idea of tolerating a certain amount of unfairness to WG in return for long-term social justice? Is that “fair”? Should we be accountable for the misdeeds of our ancestors? Maybe. Maybe not. But “fairness” sure as hell isn’t something that’s easy to measure.

35

Well that shows the framing issue some have, but it is really silly to claim it is absolutely false when an example was given. Again, Equity leads to equality. It just so happens that the expected accusing talking point about ‘having the same solution for all situations’ is not what DEI proponents talk about.

As others reported, it is not supposed to be forced, and as quotas are usually banned, mentioning that is just as a way of poisoning the discussion.

But what you point out also dismisses what is going on, usually the Minority Person is the one treated unfairly.

The point of DEI is to try to remove those barriers.

An equity-first mindset leads to equality for all. Implied in the definition of equity is the need to correct historical conditions and situations that have perpetuated inequalities. Some countries like Canada have advanced the notion of equity since 1986 with their Employment Equity Act. The purpose of this act is to achieve equality in the workplace so that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits. It’s meant to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities, and members of visible minorities. Employment equity means more than treating people in the same way. It requires special measures and the accommodation of differences. Tn the U.S., affirmative action was legislated for companies with over 50 employees who do business with the government by Executive 11246 in 1965. This is an attempt to correct past inequalities by requiring those companies to take affirmative action and set goals to achieve parity in employment. In other words, there is a need to correct past legalized exclusionary practices based on dimensions of diversity, such as race, gender, and national origin. We cannot just focus on treating everybody the same because everybody has not had the same opportunities. In this picture, we have leveled the playing field and removed the fence as a barrier to all. Equity is about correcting systems and removing barriers. We will know when we have equity when we can no longer predict outcomes by one’s identity.
We need to do the corrective work of leveling the playing field that is at the heart of equity. Correcting inequitable systems means we remove barriers.

Mary-Frances Winters (graduate of the University of Rochester with undergraduate degrees in English and Psychology, and a Master’s degree in business administration from the William E. Simon Executive Development Program.)

36

Well, if you have been sending WG, or WG-equivalent to the last 30 conferences, and WG and MP are both qualified, maybe give MP a second look to make sure that your inclination to always send WG’s might be due to an unconscious bias. Is it unfair to the current WG? Maybe a bit, but you can’t win them all. Maybe he can go to the next conference. But doing this gives MP the possibility to at least win some.

37

Well, of course. If I was a manager and such a conference was coming up, I’d happily say to WG, “you went last year, so MP is going this year”. This is simple equality and isn’t relevant to the touchy issues of equity.

38

Of course, that can also cut the other way:

Though Swann has not received a promotion since joining the Brooks Capital Management team in March 1996, he has enjoyed other benefits. Last year, he was given a glass-walled office with a clear view of the client waiting area, and he has appeared in the company newsletter 37 times since being hired. And this June, he was chosen to represent the company at the 1999 Midwest Investment Professionals Association (MIPA) conference in Indianapolis.

39

Something to remember is that DEI is not a list of commandments from God Almighty that must adhere to while exclusing all other considerations. When it comes to a new hire or a promotion you go with the best candidate regardless of of their race, age, sex, religion, etc., etc.

40

That is why I included “WG-equivalent” in my description, not that we always send the exact same white guy. The point is if we notice a general pattern that we always send white guys to these conferences, it may be worth while wondering if that is due to some sort of inherent bias that is promoting the selection of such candidates. Particular WG who was excluded might bitch and moan, but will probably be fine and get invited to other conferences because the world is still pretty much stacked in his favor. But pretending to be color-blind yet always just happening to send a WG means any MP never gets the opportunity.

If MP gets to the conference and finds that the entire conference is filled with MP and there are no WG to be found then obviously things have gone to far, but that never happens. In practice it will usually end up that MP is still under represented, but at least represented, which they wouldn’t be if everyone just pretended that they didn’t see color.

ETA:

Yeah tokenism is a thing too, but that is more performative pretending DEI, rather than making an actual effort to be inclusive, maybe Potemkin DEI. So I in the same frame as saying that the conference is filled with nothing but MP’s indicates a problem I should also say that company starts sending the same MP to every conference is also a problem.