DEI Making Headlines

Same Old, Lame Old

As 2024 got underway, the tech broligarchy began demanding the scalps of several female university presidents, among them those at Harvard and MIT.  DEI was in the headlines. And it looked to be on the chopping block.

The university leaders had recently been called before Congress to explain their responses to campus unrest in the wake of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent war on Gaza. They probably should have sensed a trap but they did not, and their responses to hostile questions came off as overly-lawyered, managing to make a vast human tragedy sound like a bureaucratic problem. 

Following the hearings, a few high profile hedge funders and activists took to Twitter and the airwaves to ascribe the women’s responses to DEI (they must be unqualified) and political correctness. The men kept banging on until two of the most prominent women were fired. 

Pundits quickly weighed in, predicting a wholesale end to organizational efforts to broaden opportunities for a vast range of employees and build cultures that supported this goal. Not just in academia but in organizations of every kind.

Of course, it didn’t happen. Because how could it? 

The reality is that multinationals, professional service firms, local businesses, sports teams, non-profits, educational institutions, and the military— the entire gamut of 21^st century enterprise— all draw from an increasingly diverse talent base. This expansion has been shaped by immigration, the empowerment of long-oppressed groups, and the integration of one half of the human race— aka women— into the workforce and public life. Political opportunists can rant all they want, but this is quite simply the world we live in now. And every organization seeking to hire, retain, and develop talent must contend with it. 

Unsurprisingly, after a winter of spilled virtual ink and pointless agonizing, the narrative lost hold outside of eccentric niches. Companies dropped their efforts to rename DEI with less explicit acronyms. Employee networks continued to gain access to larger budgets and use their increasingly robust platforms to push for change. And speechwriters went back to writing mission statements proclaiming their companies’ commitment to building cultures in which everyone could thrive, whether such claims were plausible or not. 

Now summer is upon us, bringing with it the stunning elevation of Kamala Harris, and suddenly denunciations of DEI are seizing headlines once more. But these too will vanish outside of strident, ideological niches— increasingly tagged as simply weird— for the same reason the story failed to shift organizational commitment earlier this year. This is who we are, and the only way to move forward.

Those attempting to make their case against a highly qualified candidate must contend with two obvious and important facts: the glaring entitlement of her opposition, and the rapidly evolving nature of the voter pool. For the same forces that have made DEI an imperative in companies are now transforming citizen engagement, not only in the US but in countries around the globe. While not always successful— witness the Arab Spring— energy keeps breaking out and shifting the narrative, often overnight.

The whole notion of people power— the power of we, of rising together— can only manifest when people feel 3 things: 

• Confidence in what they have to contribute 

• The desire to be inspired

• Willingness to work with those they may perceive as different from themselves

When animated by these forces, people can’t be intimidated into bowing down to great wealth, superior position, or instructions handed down from on high. 

Sorry, bros. It didn’t work in January and it’s not going to work now. 

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