Not usually one who is good with words, Donald Trump did get one definition right in his recent inaugural address. Diversity, equity, and inclusion, he said, is the “policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Compliments to the speechwriter.
Many teeth have been gnashed over DEI’s retreat from the two spheres where it first took hold, academia and corporate workplaces. Its vanquisher appears to be Trump, who, on his first day in office, issued an executive order “terminating” DEI in the federal government. Since his election, several high-profile companies have publicly rolled back their DEI commitments, and universities dependent on federal funds — including Stanford — have begun scrubbing their own programs.
Recall, however, that DEI was already in withdrawal well before the election, as the makers of America’s favorite things — Ford, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels — were ditching its mandates all through last summer. So DEI’s downfall came mostly from natural pushback, not by government fiat. And it should be welcomed, as not a single pillar of the DEI triad is worth retaining.
The term diversity — within the “conceptual framework” that is DEI — means ensuring sufficient “representation” of various groups. In practice, that project saw organizations try to fine-tune their demographic makeups by setting “diversity targets” for their workforces, aiming to assemble the proper balance of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, et cetera. Why are firms like Google now abandoning these targets? Perhaps because they were, necessarily, either illegal or ineffective.
Believe it or not, the federal government prohibited employment discrimination in a fairly obscure federal law: the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This law made it unlawful for any employer “to fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual… because of such individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.” So, if companies sought to attain workforce diversity by preferring to hire one class of person to another, they violated federal law. If not, then their “diversity targets” were nothing but hollow gestures.
The equity component of DEI purports to mean “fair treatment,” but it is expressly against equal treatment. Allow an early mover in the DEI space, McKinsey & Company, to explain: “While equality assumes that all people should be treated the same, equity takes into consideration a person’s unique circumstances, adjusting treatment accordingly so that the end result is equal.” In other words, “equity” means the leveling of group outcomes, which must culminate in the demolition of standards.
A multiplicity of circumstances is intrinsic to the human condition. Therefore, as the superb economist Thomas Sowell has documented, large variations in group outcomes are inevitable and universal across history. The only way to resolve these disparities is to erase their indicators — concealing differences in aptitude without actually diminishing them. That is why the nation’s largest school district, New York City, eliminated its gifted and talented program in 2021 for being insufficiently “equitable,” as its race-neutral standards failed to admit enough black and Hispanic students. Add individual advancement to the list of DEI casualties.
Finally, the I in DEI — inclusion — sounds like the most innocuous of the three, but is in fact the most pernicious. Its primary concern is not disability accommodations (which have been standard practice for decades), but instead, the eradication of personal discomfort. Again from McKinsey: The pursuit of inclusion demands that organizations “develop a sufficiently inclusive culture, such that all employees feel their voices will be heard.” Unfortunately, like all efforts to “develop” culture from the top down, it entails the regulation of speech.
Take the most perfect example: In 2023, the Associate Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion of Stanford Law School, Tirien Steinbach, decided that a conservative federal judge, Kyle Duncan, needed to be disrupted and chastised while speaking on campus. She did so because students felt “harmed” by his work, which “literally denies the humanity of people.” Forget about microaggressions — like saying “America is the land of opportunity,” according to Stanford in 2021 — Judge Duncan’s presence was a downright macroaggression. In this and many other cases, the “inclusion” of overly sensitive adults required that a supposedly offensive speaker be shushed.
DEI is described by its opponents as “social engineering” for good reason. The essence of DEI is tinkering — with demographics, with standards, with language — which, in turn, is the essence of engineering. But human beings are not polymers to be manipulated in a laboratory. Americans in particular are far too obstinate to be socially engineered, and thus, for the unsavory regimen of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
