Over the past few years, we’ve seen diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives take over boardrooms and human resources offices at corporations all over the Western world. What makes DEI so insidious is the way it employs critical theory to divide people in its effort to achieve the three concepts that make up the DEI acronym.
But is DEI on its way out? David Christopher Kaufman seems to think so in a column he has written at Spectator World.
“Across American business, the number of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion roles grew by 55 percent following the protests of summer 2020, reported the Society of Human Resource Management,” Kaufman writes. “At the start of 2022, the entire DEI ‘industry’ was worth an estimated $9.4 billion. In 2023, it’s a very different story. According to the workplace trends consultancy Revelio Labs, DEI jobs shrank by one-third last year.”
While this is an encouraging trend on its own, it’s also worth exploring why this may be the case. That’s what Kaufman does in his column. The tactics of the “DEI industrial complex,” as Kaufman describes it, are “aggressive and heavy-handed;” however, Kaufman points out that “study after study has revealed that [DEI] rarely works.”
Why? It’s easy for us to point fingers at the divisiveness of DEI, and that’s a huge factor, but Kaufman also highlights one factor of DEI that doesn’t often come to mind: its elitism.
“Much of this has to do with the supposed goals of DEI work — most crucially, the E, or ‘equity,’” Kaufman writes. “Because rather than truly strive for equity — or even egalitarianism — DEI efforts are almost entirely focused on helping folks become members of the elite. And elitism is the real enemy of equality.”
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Kaufman points out that the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action focused on elite colleges and universities, while STEM initiatives aimed at minorities are more successful at non-elite schools. He also notes that parity should be the goal, rather than equity.
What’s the best way to achieve parity? Kaufman notes that Zach Seward of the tech news site Quartz has expressed that companies can do better at achieving diversity when they expand their recruitment efforts. Seward explained that the Quartz team was able to recruit a more diverse staff when it opened its recruitment to remote positions outside of the company’s elite urban bubble:
It turns out there’s a whole wide world of talented people who don’t live in New York. Opening our jobs to them immediately increased the quality of our application pools; we had more and better candidates. By definition, going remote also increased the staff’s geographic diversity, which had knock-on effects, too, like socioeconomic diversity and diversity of perspective. A less obvious result, but just as striking, was the increase in applications from Black and Hispanic candidates. In retrospect, of course widening our aperture would have that effect.
Kaufman makes two key points in concluding his column. He states that “mandating diversity — much like mandating morality — is almost certain to fail” and reiterates that, with DEI, “the elite pose as benevolent while expanding access to their elitism.”
Elitism could be why DEI is on the downslope, but when more companies do what Seward’s company did, they’ll see true “diversity” — including diversity of thought — and “inclusion.” And they’ll replace the pipe dream of “equity” with equality of opportunity, which is how it should be.
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