Seems to me that the move away from calling programs DEI -- Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion -- is much the same as the move from handicapped to disabled.
It's all about negative perception and connotation. Despite being a more positive word, like having a handicap in golf, handicapped had taken on a negative connotation because of the negative attitudes of people in the culture. Changing the language does not change the attitudes. I use handicapped as much as possible as I find it to be a better word, more positive. By meaning, "disabled" means "unable," at least in its original meaning. Now it means "a person with a disability." Still, often, those labeled "disabled" are not unable, inoperative. They are operative. Sure, in some cases, some has total hearing loss or no ability to move their legs, but they are still operative in other ways. The example for disabled in the dictionary was a "disabled car," as in one that will not start or operate normally.
Likewise, the hatred from the extreme right toward DEI will not cease if DEI efforts rebrand under a new name.
However, I do think the re-branding of "creationism" as "intelligent design" was smart. Many who opposed "creationism" just due to the sound of the term may not be as equally opposed to the sound of something like "intelligent design."
Changing the name of DEI will change the culture war.
And yet, it's great to see an article like this one, and it's worth reading and thinking about.
Thanks for tuning in.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/05/05/dei-affirmative-action-rebrand-evolution/DEI is getting a new
name. Can it dump the political baggage?
Under mounting legal
and political pressure, companies’ DEI tactics are evolving.
By Taylor Telford
and
Julian Mark
May 5, 2024 at 8:05 a.m.
EDT
Last year, Eli Lilly’s annual shareholders letter
referenced the acronym for diversity, equity and inclusion 48 times. This year,
“DEI” is nowhere to be found.
In March, Starbucks got shareholder approval to replace
“representation” goals with “talent” performance for executive bonus
incentives. At Molson Coors, “People & Planet” metrics have displaced
environmental, social and governance (ESG) goals, and the acronym DEI has
disappeared altogether.
Amid growing legal, social and political backlash, American
businesses, industry groups and employment professionals are quietly scrubbing
DEI from public view — though not necessarily abandoning its practice.
As they rebrand programs and hot-button acronyms, they’re reassessing
decades-old anti-discrimination strategies and rewriting policies that once
emphasized race and gender to prioritize inclusion for all.
It’s a stark contrast to 2020, when the murder of George
Floyd unleashed a racial justice movement that prompted companies
to double down on policies aiming to increase opportunity for groups that have
historically faced discrimination. Less than a year after the Supreme Court
struck down affirmative action in colleges and universities — a landmark ruling
that found race-conscious admissions violated the right to equal treatment
under the Constitution — a growing contingent of critics is arguing that DEI
creates inequalities of its own. Some conservatives have blamed DEI
for a variety of problems, such as the Baltimore bridge collapse
and Boeing’s safety woes, without providing evidence. Dozens of anti-DEI bills
are being considered by state legislatures across the country, and DEI looks
poised to become a wedge issue in this year’s presidential election.
Johnny C. Taylor Jr., chief executive of the Society for
Human Resource Management, said that practitioners of DEI and its antecedents
traditionally have focused on improving representation for historically
marginalized groups, believing that “the magic bullet was diversity.”
“We underestimated that inclusion was the real challenge,”
Taylor said. “Now people are saying, ‘Not only should we probably call it
something different, we should probably evolve it.’”
This shifting landscape is forcing companies and
consultants to adapt on the fly, with many acting preemptively to guard against
the legal threats that have led some firms to recast or discard race-based
initiatives. They’re renaming diversity programs, overhauling internal DEI teams and
working closely with lawyers. Some are moving away from using racial and gender
considerations in hiring and promotion, and toward approaches that focus more
on inclusion.
To be sure, some companies have successfully fended off
challenges. In April, a discrimination lawsuit against an Amazon grant program
for Black, Latino and Native American contractors was dismissed by a federal
court in Texas, though the plaintiffs have appealed. Pfizer and Starbucks have
prevailed in court against similar legal attacks, though Pfizer modified the
DEI program in question to make it race-neutral, according to court filings.
And many companies have held onto their programs since
the Supreme Court ruled against Harvard
and the University of North Carolina last June. Six months
after the ruling, the employment law firm Littler Mendelson reported that 91
percent of the 320 executives surveyed said the ruling had not lessened their
prioritization of DEI. In fact, 57 percent said they had expanded
their DEI programming in the past year.
But that sentiment is far more subdued than it was in 2020,
when corporate America poured more than
$50 billion into racial justice causes. Meanwhile, the DEI
industry — which was worth an estimated $9 billion in 2023, according to market researcher Fact.MR —
is also rethinking its public face, consultants say.
Last fall, a few months after the Harvard-UNC decision,
Taylor was already noticing growing antipathy toward the methods that
companies, institutions of higher education and other organizations used to
diversify in their ranks. So instead of referring to DEI, Taylor switched to
calling these efforts “IED,” putting the focus on “inclusion” as DEI accrued
cultural and political baggage. SHRM, the human resources association he heads,
changed the name of its annual DEI conference to “Inclusion 2023.”
Some practitioners and executives dismissed the rebrand as
superficial, Taylor said, a concession to political correctness.
But months later, his strategy has proved prescient.
A growing number of companies — including language app
Duolingo, JetBlue and Molson Coors — are either listing DEI as a “risk factor”
in shareholder reports or removing mentions of diversity goals outright.
A Bloomberg Law analysis found
that two dozen public companies have incorporated similar risk-factor language
into their filings. And several companies, including Kohls, Salesforce and
Workday, have dropped references to diversity goals in regulatory filings,
the Wall Street Journal reported.
Eric Ellis, CEO of Integrity Development, a DEI
consultancy, said he’s seen the “branding merry-go-round” playing out for
decades, tracing back to the wake of the civil rights movement. He expects the
language to keep changing in response to public attacks, especially those by
high-profile figures like Elon Musk, who in January wrote on his social media platform
X that “DEI is just another word for racism.”
“If every day you’re getting pummeled and there is no
effective strategy to protect the brand of DEI, there’s no doubt it’s going to
be hard for it to survive,” Ellis said. “We keep adjusting.”
Starbucks is “a case in point” for how companies are
altering terminology around DEI, said Brian Bueno, ESG practice leader at
Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm. After Floyd’s
murder by Minneapolis police, the company was among the first wave of firms
incentivizing executives to achieve DEI targets, he noted.
In its proxy statement last year, Starbucks said it was
“holding our senior leaders collectively accountable” for goals that focused
“on improvement in Black, Indigenous, and Latinx representation at the manager
level.” It also had goals around executive mentorship for BIPOC (Black,
Indigenous, and other people of color) employees, scores on inclusive
leadership surveys and other metrics, Bueno said.
But starting this year, Starbucks is weighting its
incentive plan more toward financial performance, tethering
representation-related rewards to “talent” goals. The company’s 2024 proxy statement references
a goal to “ensure that leaders have accountability” for “creating a culture of
belonging.”
“Starbucks was an interesting case because they did come
out with very specific goals,” Bueno said. Now, “they’re moving them from a
more prominent area of the bonus plan to a little more backstage.”
Bueno estimated that 35 to 40 percent of large-cap
companies — those with a market capitalization of $10 billion
or more — have some DEI targets in their executive bonus
criteria. About half of them frame these policies around quantitative targets,
while the rest take a more qualitative approach. Still, “companies are treading
carefully,” given the legal climate, he said.
Starbucks has already withstood legal scrutiny of its
policies: In September, a federal judge in Washington state threw out a lawsuit
alleging Starbucks violated its duty to shareholders by endeavoring to
diversify its workforce. The suit targeted the company’s goals for hiring
people of color and awarding contracts to “diverse” suppliers and advertisers,
as well as its tethering of executive pay to diversity goals.
Betsy McManus, a spokeswoman for Starbucks, said the
company has a goal of achieving “racial and ethnic diversity of at least 30
percent at all corporate levels and at least 40 percent at all retail and
manufacturing roles by 2025” in the United States.
“Real inclusion requires intent, and diversity creates
stronger communities and workforce,” McManus said in a statement emailed to The
Washington Post. “With that in mind, we continue to make improvements and
changes to ensure Starbucks remains a diverse, inclusive, equitable and
accessible company.”
Eli Lilly scuttled DEI from its proxy statement this year
and dropped mentions of “racial justice” — from eight times in 2023 to one in
2024. It also eliminated a section on progress toward meeting its racial
justice commitments, which had been included in 2023.
Yet the pharmaceutical giant still ties executive
compensation to general goals of fostering diversity within the company — and
it cites fostering a diverse workforce as a core priority. In a statement to
The Post, the company said it removed the references to DEI “to avoid
redundancies in reporting.” Information about the company’s diversity efforts
and racial justice commitments are detailed in its latest “ESG report” as well
as in a separate DEI report published
last fall.
“Lilly is committed to diversity, equity and inclusion —
they are foundational in every part of our organization and essential elements
of our success as a company,” Eli Lilly said.
Molson Coors, meanwhile, erased DEI references from its “People
& Planet” metrics, a change from 2023. This year, it says, fostering an
“inclusive culture” is central to its efforts. The company did not respond to a
request for comment.
Many large companies see a correlation between a diverse
workforce and financial success, and routinely tout the “business case” for
DEI.
Companies with the highest racial, ethnic and gender
representation are 39 percent more likely to financially outperform, according
to a 2023 study by McKinsey & Co. involving
more than 1,200 firms worldwide. In June of last year, a study by the ratings agency
Moody’s found that companies with higher ratings tended to have
a greater racial diversity on their boards and in their executive ranks.
In his annual letter to shareholders this
year, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon emphasized that DEI “initiatives make us a
more inclusive company and lead to more innovation, smarter decisions and
better financial results for us and for the economy overall.”
Still,
he said, JPMorgan will “scour” its programs to ensure they comply with the
changing legal landscape. Similar assessments are playing out at Meta, Snap,
DoorDash and Home Depot, which have culled their internal DEI teams in the past
year. Others, such as Zoom, have outsourced their DEI work to consultant
Marilyn Fish, an Atlanta-based employment attorney who
specializes in affirmative action, said she’s seen companies “looking at
policies more holistically” since the Harvard-UNC decision. Many of her clients
— among them Fortune 500 companies — have renamed their programs to put
“inclusion” up front, hoping it will resonate with employees.
Some of her clients recently moved away from employee
resource groups that had identified some people as “members” and others as
“allies.” Some opened up mentorship programs that were reserved for employees
of certain races to people of all backgrounds.
“I do think that some programs were operating with an
exclusivity that was potentially problematic,” Fish said. She doesn’t think the
new labels matter much from a legal perspective. “What matters most
is how their programs are being implemented.”
Joelle Emerson, chief executive of DEI consultancy
Paradigm, considers corporate DEI to be “one of the most visible civil rights
initiatives of the past decade.” Much like affirmative action before it, DEI
has faced resistance from within organizations and outside them — and now it’s
being thrust into the political limelight at a moment of acute polarization.
“DEI has only been the
acronym du jour since 2020,” Emerson said. “Regardless of what we call it,
we’ve done a really poor job storytelling what this work is actually about.”
The rebranding is clearly being sparked by the “baggage”
now associated with DEI, Emerson said. She pointed to conservative activist
Christopher Rufo, who led the campaign to oust Harvard’s first Black president,
Claudine Gay, framing her exit as “the beginning of the end for DEI in
America’s institutions.”
“Companies with leaders that might be particularly
supportive of DEI might also be the ones that are uniquely averse to drawing
scrutiny,” Emerson said. “A lot of the companies that were vocal in the past
have already been sued.”
Rhonda Moret, founder of Elevated Diversity, a DEI
consultancy, said she’s seen “a shift in what we’re being asked to do.” Demand
for programs such as unconscious bias training — high a few years ago — has
dried up, she said. But there’s been a spike of interest in employee resource
groups, particularly those that aren’t race-based, such as groups for
caregivers, veterans and first-generation Americans.
Like many consultants, Moret has been tweaking the
terminology she uses to describe her work, now framing it as L&I
(leadership and inclusion). She prides herself on having always taken an
“inclusion-forward” approach, and she’s noticed the movement away from
emphasizing “diversity” in her field.
But she’s conflicted about whether to follow the tide and
change Elevated Diversity’s name.
“I am what someone thinks of when they think of diversity,”
said Moret, who is Black. “Do I want to change who I am to be able to fit into
another model? I still haven’t decided.”
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