Consider This from NPR - The rise and fall of the DEI movement

Episode Date: September 6, 2024

We're in a moment where DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) hiring practices mean many different things to many people. Over the past four years, many of the companies that publicly embraced DEI policies in the wake of George Floyd's murder have been backing away. What are the politics behind the anti-DEI backlash and what happens when workplace diversity initiatives are lost?Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It was called the Summer of Racial Reckoning. George Floyd! George Floyd! In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, protests erupted across the country calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism. And as tens of thousands took to the streets, some of America's largest corporations joined the call for racial justice. In Nike's new ad, the shoemaker is using its Just Do It brand to say what not to do. Don't turn your back on racism.

Microsoft is joining Amazon and IBM in refusing to sell its facial recognition software to police. So far, companies have pledged more than $1.7 billion to advance racial justice. They pledged to take a stand against systemic racism, donated millions to organizations that fight for social justice, promised to support businesses run by women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community. And some companies went a step further, extending the social justice narrative and creating programs to incorporate the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion in hiring, retaining, and promoting talent. I have resigned as a member of the Reddit board. I have urged them to fill my seat with a black candidate. But almost as soon as companies embraced DEI, the landscape of

corporate reckoning began to shift. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, programs are under attack by conservative lawmakers. Lowe's scrapping their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs after facing pressure. Harley-Davidson is the latest company to drop diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Technology companies, including Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also meta-platforms have made big cuts to those DEI programs. Backlash against DEI gained momentum with the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that abolished affirmative action emissions in colleges. And while the law only applied to higher learning,

it created a legal opening for those who oppose DEI policies in the workplace. I spoke with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman about this last spring, and he pointed out the affirmative action ruling could stifle companies' ability to consider racial diversity in hiring. They will no longer tell themselves when they're making a hiring decision, well, if we have two roughly comparable candidates, this candidate adds racial diversity to our workforce, and therefore we should hire that person because they'll be concerned that the courts will find that to be unlawful discrimination. Over the past four years, many of the companies that so publicly embrace DEI policies have been backing away. What are the politics behind the DEI backlash?

And what happens when workplace diversity initiatives are lost? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Consider This from NPR. DEI has become many things to many people at this moment. So to better understand both the anti-DEI movement and why DEI is important, we called up David Glasgow. He's the executive director of the Melzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at the NY School of Law. And I started by asking him to define DEI as he sees it. Yeah, so I think it's helpful to actually pick apart the three letters in the acronym of DEI

because they each mean different things. So the D part for diversity is really about, you know, diversifying the personnel in a particular institution. So you might focus on hiring, retention, or promotion just to make sure that the people at the top of the organization or being brought into the organization kind of match the demographics of the applicant pool or the local labor pool. The E for equity is really about ensuring basic fairness in the way that your organizational systems and processes operate. So fairness and things like your employee benefits programs or how you hire people, the work assignments that people get, opportunities for mentorship and the like. And then the I is for inclusion.

And that's really about workplace and institutional culture. So do you have the kind of environment where people show up to work each day feeling respected, feeling that their voice is heard, that they're able to contribute their best ideas and be treated well by their colleagues and by their supervisors. And so together, the acronym is really just about how do we ensure that in this diverse

multicultural society that we live in, that people of a whole variety of different backgrounds and identities feel that they can succeed and thrive inside their institutions. I want to talk about the current political moment, but I think it's worth, because 2020 feels so long ago in so many different ways, to rewind and talk about how a lot of this really became top of mind to so many people. Of course, there's a lot of people who have been working in this field for a very long time, but I feel like it kind of rose to top of mind prominence in the summer of 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, following the death of George Floyd. You see a lot of companies very publicly making a big show of implementing new DEI initiatives or beefing up existing programs. What do you think these companies were trying to accomplish in that moment?

I think a lot of organizations in that moment realized that they hadn't made enough progress on a lot of the issues that they may have been concerned about for a long time. So a lot of the statistics within companies at the top in C-suites, executive suites, leadership positions remained pretty homogeneous. And I think that that moment after the murder of George Floyd, it was really a flashpoint, a moment for reflection where, you know, leaders felt, you know, tremendous political pressure, I think, to do something to change their practices within their workplaces to make them better, not just for, you know, black workers, but for, you know, workers of a variety of marginalized backgrounds who were saying that their organizations weren't really serving their needs.

So I think it was responding to, you know, political pressure, but I think it was responding to, you know, a very real kind of cultural problem within these organizations, many of whom had been trying to fix those issues for quite a long time. I guess before I ask you more about that, I'm just wondering how you have reacted and responded in this current political moment when DEI is kind of used as a dismissive slur. It's just a DEI hire. How do you make sense of that? How does that make you feel when you see that happening over and over again? Yeah, well, you know, for one, I think it makes me realize that proponents of DEI need to do a better job of making the case for DEI, because I think a lot

of the anti-DEI activists have been quite successful in creating that kind of perception and that narrative around DEI as something that is, you know, opposed to merit, opposed to freedom, opposed to fairness, all of these kind of values that, you know, Americans to merit, opposed to freedom, opposed to fairness, all of these kind of values that, you know, Americans really hold dear. And so I kind of think that for a long time, proponents of DEI have just kind of assumed that the words diversity, equity and inclusion sort of sound good and friendly and warm. And so, you know, people are just going to support them. And I think now we're in a moment where we kind of need to get back on the front foot and make an affirmative case for it. You know, but the other thing that, you know, had just caused me to reflect on is really the legal landscape, because, you know, I work in a

research centre at a law school. And a lot of the backlash is coming from really the legal environment that we're in subsequent to the Supreme Court's decision in the Students for Fair Admissions, you know, affirmative action case last year. And so, you know, we're in subsequent to the Supreme Court's decision in the Students for Fair Admissions affirmative action case last year. And so we are doing a lot of work thinking about what are the legal kind of strategies and guidance that organizations need to continue doing this work right now, because a lot of them are retreating, I think, out of fear of litigation. I want to ask you a few questions from the anti-DEI point of view, but in two very different ways. And first, I want to ask about the people who have really focused on attacking this and the kind of the culture war aspect of this. What do you think the people that you're observing are getting wrong about this from your point of view and how they're talking about these programs and efforts and what they do? So I think the major thing that they're getting wrong is by reducing all of DEI to, you know, what they often call racial preferences. So I think the way that they're framing DEI is that certain groups are

getting an unfair advantage over other groups in access to opportunities in the workplace. Whereas, you know, DEI is just such a broad umbrella term that includes a whole range of practices that go well beyond that. So, you know, if you're an organization that sets, you know, merit-based criteria for recruitment and promotion, or has a, you know, structured interview process where you make sure that all candidates are assessed against the same criteria, I would consider that to be a DEI program, right? Even though no one is given any sort of preference or advantage in that kind of a system. Or if you think about things like, you know, parental leave or flexible work arrangements

or childcare support, again, you know, I see that as a DEI sort of program to help, you know, parents of young children and women advance within the organization. Or if you do outreach to broaden, you know, candidate pools of people who are applying for jobs at your organization. So I think the biggest mistake that they do, and you know, I think honestly, in some cases, it is quite deliberate is to really zoom in on just the kind of DEI practices that aim to specifically uplift a particular marginalized group in the workplace, and then treat that as though that's all of what DEI is. Flip side, what do you think the most legitimate critique of DEI is when it comes to how it has been practiced by large corporations who have thrown a lot of time and effort and resources

into the last few years, particularly? Yeah, so a couple of things, you know, one is that I think, sometimes it's not implemented with a lot of rigor, I think some organizations will just, you know, rush to implement a kind of one off, you know, unconscious bias training or something, and not really think deeply about the design of the program, you know, who's running it, is this research backed or not. And so there's a lot of, you know, who's running it, is this research backed or not. And so there's a lot of, you know, quality variance. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have sat through, you know, some terrible diversity trainings in their time. So I think that kind of slapdash and unrigorous approach to DEI is one component of it. And then I think another legitimate criticism is really approaches to DEI that involve, you know, excessive they make one mistake, if they use, you know, a piece of terminology that's out of date that they didn't realize was outdated,

that they were going to get, you know, shamed by other people, you know, in their workplaces or in their, you know, schools or what have you. And so I think those kinds of approaches to DEI are not particularly helpful and are just kind of given fuel to the anti-DEI activists fire. Lastly, as we talk in this moment of several major companies scaling these initiatives back, what do you think the biggest thing that's lost is when a company does do that? Well, I think the biggest thing that's lost is the kind of culture that I was describing at the outset of our conversation, where people of all sort of backgrounds and identities feel that they have an opportunity to succeed within the organization.

You know, when you get back to the fundamentals, that's really what, you know, DEI is about. And so when you rip away these programs and you say, you know what, we're no longer going to, you know, put our company's name forward for the Human Rights Campaign's Corporate Equality Index for LGBTQ inclusion, or we're no longer going to prioritize, you know, increasing women in leadership in our organization, or we're no longer going to prioritize, you know, increasing women in leadership in our organization, or we're no longer going to sort of train our, you know, managers on how to mitigate, you know, bias against, you know, people of color or others in our promotion process. I think what that does is kind of sends a message to people from underrepresented backgrounds in the workplace that maybe, you know, they don't belong there,

or that they don't have a path to, you know, they don't belong there or that they don't have a path to, you know, promotion or a path to succeed within the organization. And so, yeah, I just think it's incumbent on organizations to, you know, not just consider the risks that are coming from the anti-DEI side, you know, legal and reputational risks, but also really think about the risks from the other side and what's lost if you retreat from DEI. That's David Glasgow, Executive Director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU's School of Law. Thank you so much.

Pleasure to be with you. This episode was produced by Brianna Scott and Mark Rivers. It was edited by Jeanette Woods. Our executive producer is Sam McGinnigan. Thanks to our Consider This Plus listeners who support the work of NPR journalists and help keep public radio strong. Supporters also hear every episode without messages from sponsors. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.