DEI Deconstructed: Your No-Nonsense Guide to Doing the Work and Doing It Right

by Lily Zheng

My approach is laser-focused on outcomes and sees tactics and interventions as items in an ever-growing toolbox leveraged to turn homogenous, exclusive, and inequitable organizations into the opposite.

Maybe you’re a mid-level manager or leader who wants a more comprehensive understanding of what DEI looks like as a real organizational commitment in action rather than a collection of inspirational speeches.

Both sociologists argue that companies’ command-and-control deployment of diversity programs, hiring tests, and grievance processes have failed to move the needle on the representation of women and non-White racial groups in the US.

“Among all US companies with 100 or more employees,” Dobbin and Kalev write, “the proportion of black men in management increased just slightly—from 3% to 3.3%—from 1985 to 2014. White women saw bigger gains from 1985 to 2000—rising from 22% to 29% of managers— but their numbers haven’t budged since then.”1

The general point that Dobbin and Kalev make is that when DEI interventions attempt to compel or control the behavior of people in power, these people often respond with counterproductive behavior that jeopardizes the outcomes the interventions are trying to create, resulting in the unintended effects shown in

The challenge with DEI surveys is that “good data” is much easier said than gathered.

DEI surveys create the expectation that collected data will be used to address identified issues as expeditiously as possible.

If data transparency is lacking or company leadership is unwilling to act on all the findings from the data, this can substantially erode trust and demoralize a workforce.

I’m saying that DEI done wrong doesn’t work, and DEI that doesn’t work is often the case because it was done wrong.

Diversity, equity, and inclusion work in organizations is about achieving diversity, equity, and inclusion as tangible outcomes at a scale beyond the individual.

“Active racist behavior is equivalent to walking fast on the conveyor belt. The person engaged in active racist behavior has identified with the ideology of White supremacy and is moving with it. Passive racist behavior is equivalent to standing still on the walkway. No overt effort is being made, but the conveyor belt moves the bystanders along to the same destination as those who are actively walking. Some of the bystanders may feel the motion of the conveyor belt, see the active racists ahead of them, and choose to turn around, unwilling to go in the same destination as the White supremacists. But unless they are walking actively in the opposite direction faster than the conveyor belt—unless they are actively antiracist—they will find themselves carried along with the others.”

An uncomfortable percentage of modern DEI work amounts to moonwalking toward inequity, from poorly designed training to irresponsibly deployed policy to earnest but unskilled volunteer initiatives.

Our organizations, and certainly our world, continue to be unacceptably inequitable, exclusive, and homogenous. And despite the best of intentions, we as leaders, advocates, activists, and practitioners don’t yet have a collective handle on how to meaningfully change that at scale.

Either we all figure out how to do DEI and do it right, or this work implodes under the weight of its popularity and everyone doing it becomes irrevocably complicit in the inequitable status quo.

A pragmatic approach to DEI is centered on achieving outcomes.

The fair treatment, access, opportunity, and advancement for all people, while at the same time striving to identify and eliminate barriers that prevent the full participation of some groups.

Many “good” definitions of equity do a few things: they acknowledge the presence of structural or systemic inequity in the present day, identify the long historical roots of these inequities, and set an intention to do their utmost to dismantle present-day barriers to achieve some standard of “fairness.”

lacking among all this is a clear understanding of what specific outcomes their good intentions are trying to create, and that lack of clarity means that most definitions out there boil down to “equity means trying to make things better.”

Equity is the measured experience of individual, interpersonal, and organizational success and well-being across all stakeholder populations and the absence of discrimination, mistreatment, or abuse for all. Equity is achieved by eliminating structural barriers resulting from historical and present-day inequities and meeting individuals’, groups’, and organizations’ unique needs.

Many people’s de facto understanding of diversity rests on at least a surface-level understanding that “diversity” must aim to correct historical and present-day inequities.

Homogenous groups are more prone to make mistakes and converge in their thinking—a process called groupthink6—while more diverse groups are more rigorous in their decision-making and make decisions that are more effective for more groups of people.

And when organizations gain more diversity, especially among their senior leadership, biased language elsewhere in the organization decreases.

diversity is about not the simple “presence” of difference in a given environment but rather the felt experience of being “seen” or “represented” by those in the environment for their difference,

Diversity is the workforce composition that all stakeholders, especially underserved and marginalized populations, trust to be representative and accountable. Diversity is achieved through actions that explicitly counter present-day and historical inequities and meet the unique needs of all populations.

It’s trust, often achieved through representational parity but not always requiring it, that dictates whether we consider a given entity “diverse.”

the new goal post of “a demographic composition that all populations trust as representative and accountable” is both easier and harder to reach than the old goal of representative parity.

We over-focus on the identities that people bring to the table as boxes to check rather than focusing on the actions these people take and the outcomes they’re able to achieve.

Most efforts to define “inclusion” simply ask survey participants what the nebulous term means to them and generalize their responses into something snappy.

Inclusion is the achievement of an environment that all stakeholders, especially underserved and marginalized populations, trust to be respectful and accountable. Inclusion is achieved through actions that explicitly counter present-day and historical inequities and meet the unique needs of all populations.

This definition of inclusion centers on the relationship between people and their environment.

By integrating the idea of trust into this definition, we make space for the overwhelming plurality of definitions and strategies for achieving inclusion in the DEI space: any strategy for achieving inclusion is valid if it results in the outcome of stakeholders trusting that an environment is respectful and accountable.

Equity is about enabling individual and organizational success, often through policy, structure, and process that eliminate barriers. Diversity is about enabling trust through having the right mix of people present. Inclusion is about enabling trust through everything else—the intangibles of modern organizations like organizational culture, interpersonal norms, employee well-being, and so much more.

key goal of intersectional analyses is understanding how different combinations—or intersections—of dimensions yield different experiences that expose nuances in larger patterns of inequity and inform future action.

Microaggression.

metric by which we measure inclusion,

the relative presence of microaggressions indicates the relative lack of inclusion.

Power. The ability to decide, define, influence, or change outcomes of any kind on individual, interpersonal, or organizational levels.

incomplete knowledge can be far more dangerous than no knowledge at all, and when DEI work involves such high stakes as people’s employment, wellness, and survival, it’s imperative that we act carefully around knowledge acquisition.

negative expertise: knowledge and awareness of what to avoid that typically comes from direct experience but can be learned from the experiences of others.

the most common failure modes can be summed up by the failure to answer or align on just five key questions:

“What are we trying to achieve through DEI work?”

“What ought we do for our employees, customers, and the world?”

“What is the role of power and the powerful in making a change?”

some people believe that the role of leaders is to sit back and let grassroots movements take the lead and others believe that leaders should be at the forefront of the work, that conflict can undermine efforts entirely.

“How should we approach identity and difference?

“What does the work look like when it’s done effectively?”

By focusing on the positive representations of these groups and their contribution to culture and history, multiculturalism aimed to secure greater political power for these people beyond legal nondiscrimination protections.

There’s some interesting data here for sure: multicultural approaches to discussing difference are connected to at least a temporary dip in prejudice38 and boosts to workplace engagement39 for all parties.

White people exposed to multicultural language that highlights the value of non-White contributions have a lower tolerance for disagreement or conflict.

multiculturalism has been repeatedly linked to greater stereotyping and pigeonholing, with people viewing members of different cultural groups through a narrower lens.