A majority of Americans across nearly all demographic groups said DEI initiatives have made no impact on their personal careers, according to a newly released Harris Poll/Axios Vibes survey.
Why it matters: Republican lawmakers and activists have vilified DEI, a term for diversity, equity and inclusion policies used by employers. Companies have responded by rolling back programs.
- Yet Americans — and businesses — have a generally positive to at least indifferent view on the subject.
- On balance, most demographic groups were more likely to say DEI benefited their career than hindered it.
I am actually surprised there has been so little corporate pushback on DEI because it is good for business.
Having a diverse workforce means you can better address the needs and desires of a diversity of customers. You’re a lot likelier to get Latino customers if you have people of Latino heritage around to let them know what might work and what will almost certainly not.
Never underestimate the degree to which corporate management believes that they already do everything they need to and have no blind spots, or how much they resent any cost which is not directly revenue-generating.
Being in enterprise IT I’m intimately familiar with this mindset.
I’ve always felt bad for IT. They hire enough and give you just enough resources to limp along, but never enough to actually do your job well. And I feel like every few years they have to run a skeleton crew so small that something major happens to remind them why they pay you at all.
At my last job, we had to get CFO approval to buy a bag of zip ties, and the PO was denied. It was like $3.
But yeah, we had offices in India with an IT team there, and one of the C-suite assholes loved to tell us how he could replace us with 10 Indians for what they paid us.
At one point, a coworker stopped giving a fuck and said, “You’re full of shit. If you could do that, you already would have.”
At my last job, I had three meetings to discuss why we needed SSDs instead of rotational hard disks for a build server. The cost of the employees attending the meetings several orders of magnitude exceeded the cost of the purchase.
The cost of the CFO taking the time to look at that approval was more than the zip ties.
Yup, it was ridiculous.
But that’s my point. DEI generates more revenue because it broadens customer bases.
WFH also increases revenue, yet most companies are doing RTO
RTO is about power and control. People who work from home realize that work is just a part of life. There are pros and cons to both office and home working situations, but corporate mandates are not based on what is best or most efficient. It’s about who chooses their working style.
same with corporations not hiring diverse staffs unless they’re forced. none ofethis is actually about money, the economy, or the price of eggs. it’s all about colonialism, genocide, and hate
Jesus fucking Christ. No. The vast majority of corporate hiring decisions are ultimately made based on subconscious biases held by individual HR employees, DEI initiatives primarily serve to break those biases. Yes, subconscious biases can still be racist and/or sexist or otherwise harmful, but they’re not intentionally harmful, nevermind hateful, colonialist (the fuck?) or genocidal (where on earth did you even get that from?!).
I mean, it’s always about money. It’s just that it’s the big money that the oligarchs make by profiting from colonialism, genocide, and fostering hate. The small money, the money businesses make and spend, the millions in operating costs and profits, that’s not the money that matters.
And that’s exactly the same reason why many companies are ditching DEI
Nowadays more and more businesses are built to rot (or bought by private equity and converted to this model), spending only a very brief period of their life cycle trying to attract customers and talented workers. Or put another way, they’re increasingly being fattened up as quickly as possible for slaughter.
Most will die quickly while clawing as much value back from both customers and workers as possible, while a few winners are monopolies that do the exact same thing but get away with it for longer because there isn’t strong enough competition for people to stop doing business with them (such as Adobe, from what I’ve heard).
As long as investors and executives keep getting the big payoffs they do by gaming the system, it keeps getting worse.
Ahh, but they are already convinced that they have the best people to broaden their customer base because those are the people they picked, and therefore there is no need to spend any money on staff and initiatives to tell them they are wrong, when that money is better spent on bonuses and marketing. Business nerds at Wharton may spot some general trends, but they don’t know Company X, which has the best management team ever assembled.
Not necessarily. A lot of recent TV shows, movies, and video games have had their creators publicly blaming “anti-woke backlash” for poor performances. The creators themselves are saying this so I would assume they’ve got some basis for it, and if that’s the case then in those instances implementing visible DEI efforts is narrowing the customer base.
This has become a front on a “culture war” and it wouldn’t be a “culture war” if there weren’t contesting sides. So if you align yourself clearly with one side or the other you’re cutting off a part of the customer base. I can see it as plausible that companies would decide “let’s just continue to not be racist but not make a big deal out of it and hopefully not offend anyone in the process.”
It’s a lot easier to point at online trolls’ anti-woke criticism of your art than to admit you made shitty art.
It’s also very easy for a loud but small group to control the narrative about a movie and get people to assume it isn’t a good movie. Even before the movie comes out, it’s already box office poison. It happened with Captain Marvel. The minute that movie was announced, the anti-woke brigade went into high gear and found every reason to badmouth the fact that Disney dared to make a movie where a woman was the hero.
It’s true that that can happen, but you can’t assume it’s the case for all criticism. For example, I agree that Captain Marvel was a bad movie for a lot of reasons. However, The Marvels avoided these issues and consequently I think it was a solid movie. Both movies received hate online, although interestingly I think The Marvels got less hate despite having 3x as many women protagonists. So, how do you know which criticisms are anti-feminist and which are legit? It’s a case-by-case thing, really. Some movies definitely get the anti-woke backlash more than others though. The only analysis I’m confident is incorrect is “all criticism of [movie] is [legit / just anti-woke hate]”, because there are always a variety of takes being lumped together inaccurately.
Well for one thing, you can check and see if the criticisms were made before the movie even came out.
For another, you can check and see who is making them.
Neither of these are difficult, but people don’t bother.
The creators themselves are saying this so I would assume they’ve got some basis for it
Yes, their basis is they wrote a shitty show, hoping the diversity would make up for their bad writing, and decided to blame the diversity for it instead of their own failures.
In my unprofessional opinion: yea
it wouldn’t be a “culture war” if there weren’t
contesting sidesa class war that needed handy wedges to keep the people dividedFTFY
Just because the upper class is using their influence to encourage conservative hate, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t currently hateful.
Regardless of why there are contesting sides, the contesting sides are still there.
I’m not arguing for or against any of this, I should note. I’m just pointing out that this division exists. If a company advertises “we’re DEI!” Then that may attract some new customers but it may also repel some existing ones, so it’s something that needs to be done with care.
Personally, I wish that companies would just go ahead and do their best to not be biased in who they employ and who they cater to, and that that would be enough.
You are seriously exaggerating here. A few have said that. Not a lot. And the entertainment industry is a tiny slice of American business and one that relies less on speaking directly to individual customers like, say, AT&T or Kroger.
Budweiser also experienced a backlash-based boycott over issues like this, it’s not just the entertainment industry.
My point is just that “DEI generates more revenue because it broadens customer bases” is not necessarily true. It’s an overly broad statement, there are cases where that’s not the case and so companies should take that into account and perhaps be cautious about advertising their DEI initiatives. It’s become political, which means taking one side necessarily puts you at odds with the other side. That’s potential customers.
What are you even talking about? DEI has nothing to do with either the entertainment industry having more diverse characters in movies or about Budweiser contracting a transgender spokesperson for what should have been an insignificant media campaign.
But your objection to people who are not white and heteronormative in the media is noted.
But your objection to people who are not white and heteronormative in the media is noted.
And here’s why this is such a dangerous topic to touch on, it instantly becomes “us vs them” and you see a fight to be fought even when it’s not actually there.
I made no such objection.
Being on the good side of government is also good for business. Especially if there are incoming tariffs. I bet many are hoping for exceptions.
I think the places that believe in it are telling that to their employees on the regular, just not boasting about it more broadly so they don’t become a lightning rod.
A lot of folks firmly believe fostering a diverse, equitable and inclusive culture is ultimately good for your business. Aside from the points you and others have made about being able to attract more diverse customers, it also fosters an environment where people from different backgrounds can freely present their thoughts and opinions ultimately resulting in your company running better.
Compared to say Twitter where the opinion of only one white racist male matters, and I’m sure folks who used to feel inspired at work now feel trapped, unappreciated, and unable to truly innovate.
This is true at my work (big tech). We have a DEI executive that’s high enough up the ladder that her picture is on the website with the rest of the execs. On the other hand, the founder/owner no doubt donates to the GOP.
Even just the presence of a diverse workforce tells customers of all kinds that everyone is welcome there.
i hated DEI at my old company because i was forced to berate someone in class while standing in front of the class. i would have gotten reprimanded/fired if i did not complete the course, and this was required for the course.
at my current conpany, i understand why DEI is important. fuck my old company. it was the worst.
Now only pole the loudest Americans.
Business should be looking for the best candidates wherever they can find them. Well structured DEI policies do not contradict that. In fact, they lead to better candidates all around, because they encourage hiring managers to look at the entire diverse pool of candidates.
I feel the anti-diversity crusaders have a zero-sum view of the world, where there is only one best candidate (who coincidentally looks like they do) and if someone else gets a job over them it must mean that the scales were tipped somehow. In reality, though, there can be multiple best candidates, and where there are, it’s entirely appropriate to bring in someone who can provide a different point of view.
I mean, this is basically Clarence Thomas’ entire character arc. He fought through a lot of adversity as a child (both due to his poor upbringing and outright racism) and was actually quite active in the civil rights movement. He got his law degree at Yale, only to find the racist people running the law firms at the time didn’t believe he was that smart, and only got his degree because of affirmative action. Yet somehow, instead of blaming the racist fucks for being so racist, he blamed Yale for admitting him in the first place. Somehow getting reverse brainwashed into promoting the agendas of people he hated.
Under today’s DEI policies, law firms would be actively looking for the next Clarence Thomas, not because they need to fill a quota with a Black man, but because they know the next star legal minds could come from anywhere, so they need to make sure they don’t accidentally exclude anyone.
there could be multiple best candidates
This may seem uninvuitive to some people, but it makes sense when you consider that two candidates might be not directly comparable. Eg. one is better at task X and worse at task Y, and the other is the opposite. DEI encourages weighting different strengths in a particular way, so accounting for it may cause you to choose a different “best” candidate than if you had weighted their strengths differently.
DEI is a conservative concept: have your corporate masters both decide how anti-racism can justify it’s existence (good for business) and how it should be implemented (top down corpo scolding).
It’s not a social issue, it’s a marketing campaign. And we shouldn’t feel obligated to defend something so hideous and trivial just because it aggravates the reactionary.
In an ideal world, you would be right. Unfortunately, corporations HAVE TO advertise the benefits of DEI and HAVE TO do top down scolding, because if they don’t then many people would either ignore their biases or outright follow their biases. When I moved into management in a large corporation that works hard to have a diverse and inclusive environment, I was shocked at the vile things some hiring managers were saying when they didn’t think the “wrong” people were listening. That subset of people need to either be forced or given justification to implement diversity into their orgs.
Polling is essentially irrelevant to determine the actual effects of DEI initiatives
