With Diversity, Equity and Inclusion under attack, focus on Fairnessss

By Brigid Schulte

Every day brings disturbing new headlines about how the federal government, agencies and contractors, universities and many business leaders are scrambling to comply with the Trump administration's vehement and wholesale attack on diversity, equity and inclusion.

The brilliant writing of Maya Angelou? Purged from the U.S. Naval Academy library. Preferred personal pronouns? Forcibly removed from federal emails. Corporations once committed to furthering diversity and equity? Many are in full retreat. Esteemed scientists, decorated military leaders and workers who are women or people of color? Disproportionately fired.

In his sweeping executive order, signed one day after his inauguration, Trump called efforts to promote diversity, equity and inclusion "illegal," and "immoral." Onetime Fox News host and current Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has long denounced DEI efforts as "woke" and charged that they've made the military "effeminate."

Here's the thing, Trump may not be wrong in putting an end to some DEI initiatives in workplaces, but he's dead wrong if he thinks doing nothing will ensure a fair, merit-based world.

Trump's executive order says: "Hardworking Americans who deserve a shot at the American Dream should not be stigmatized, demeaned, or shut out of opportunities because of their race or sex."

Turns out, that's exactly what effective diversity, equity and inclusion efforts were trying to do. In reality, as I wrote in a recent piece for U.S. News and World Report, many workplace DEI programs weren't well designed and didn't work.

Case in point, as I wrote in the piece:"Let's not forget that white men still dominate the leadership ranks in organizations in virtually every sector of the economy. Lean In's Women in the Workplace 2024 study estimated that it will take almost 50 years for women to reach parity with men in corporate America. And decades of research show that even when men and women have the same job ratings, men are rewarded and promoted at a faster pace, that women receive less credit than men for the same work, and that bias predicts attrition and low engagement and productivity."

Yet, there is a perception among some segments of the population that DEI programs unfairly reward women and people of color and disadvantage white men or lower standards, as Bloomberg's Sarah Green Carmichael explained in a well-researched column, More than 40 percent of young men believe that U.S. society discriminates against them, according to the Survey Center on American Life. The Pew Research Institute found last year that 40 percent of male Trump voters under 50 agreed that "the gains women have made in society have come at the expense of men."

So what to do? How do we get beyond this aggrieved zero-sum thinking to open equitable opportunity and build a fairer, merit-based world where, indeed, all hard working Americans can thrive?

Focus on fairness.

Fairness, research shows, is a deeply held human value. We need to be reminded that even in the chaos and vitriol of this moment, there is both a deep commitment to fairness and compelling research to show how it benefits everyone. (Authors of the Spirit Level have found that in more unequal, or unfair societies, everyone experiences poorer health, more exposure to violence and shorter life spans.)

New research, for instance, found that an overwhelming majority of Americans approve of equity and fairness: more than 82 percent of more than 5,000 surveyed agreed with statements like, "Racial diversity benefits the country."

But here's what's critical: the researchers also found that people underestimated the support for diversity and inclusion among other Americans and overestimated anti-DEI sentiment. But when people were told about the widespread support for diversity, they were more likely to support it as well.

The goal we should be striving for is fairness for all people. We need to keep pointing out how some organizations are not, like Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, calling for "more masculine" work cultures, but instead doubling down on fairness. In his Substack, Work Forward, Brian Elliot reports that Marriott International CEO Anthony Capuano sent this message to employees: "There are some fundamental truths … we welcome all to our hotels and we create opportunities for all - and fundamentally those will never change." He was flooded with more than 40,000 messages of gratitude.

AlixPartners, a global business advisory firm, surveyed 3,200 executives around the globe and found that 94 percent of the most profitable view diversity and inclusion as a competitive advantage.

Ultimately, smart organizations know they need the best people for the job. And, in addition to my piece in U.S. News, we published two Better Life Conversations recently that offer practical strategies and show how organizations can design fair systems and flexible work cultures to both attract and retain the best people, from all walks of life.

If organizations can do that, then this can even be a moment of real opportunity, Siri Chilazi, a senior researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and co-author of the new book, Make Work Fair: Data-Driven Design for Real Results, told me in our Better Life Conversation.

The book cites a raft of research about how to create fairer systems for hiring, evaluating, promoting, rewarding people and structuring meetings, among many other practical strategies. Here's Chilazi on promotions:

"In most of our organizations, the way you get promoted is you have to ask for it, or your manager has to ask for it. So part of what this process is testing is someone's willingness or ability to self-promote, to be aggressive, to self-advocate, which may or may not be a mark of success or acquired skill in most jobs.

One solution that's been shown to level the playing field is moving from this kind of "opt-in" promotion system, where you have to actively raise your hand, to an "opt-out" system, where after a certain amount of time, all relevant employees are automatically considered for promotion…It doesn't mean that everyone will get promoted, but we'll actually review them. That would be an example of an "opt-out" scheme that has been shown to really level the playing field."

As I wrote for U.S. News, Joan C. Williams, founding director of the Equality Action Center, recently published research on the results of small "bias interrupter" tweaks that she and her colleagues implemented over two years at several Conference Board member companies. They found that by making small changes to hiring, performance reviews, task assignments and the like, companies were able to draw from a wider, more diverse talent pool and hire, evaluate, and promote the most qualified candidates for the job. When one tech company, for instance, moved from open-ended to structured interviews-developing a set of questions tied to the tasks, competencies, and requirements of the job and asking each candidate the same ones-White, Black and Latina women who'd historically been excluded were more likely to be hired.

Likewise, when performance evaluations at another company focused on evidence-based feedback looking at specific behaviors and based on "clear competency criteria" - rather than the typical subjective manager impressions of employee personality-evaluations became fairer for everyone.

Strategist Lily Zheng offers similar practical systems changes and tweaks in the Fair Framework. Check out her article What Comes after DEI in the Harvard Business Review and her interview with Charter, where she says, "If you ask me how to mitigate hiring discrimination, I'm not going to recommend you sit everyone down for three hours to train them on every single racial bias that exists. I'll just say, 'Standardize your hiring process.'"

In another Better Life Conversation I had with Manar Morales, founder and CEO of the Diversity and Flexibility Alliance, laid out how flexible and diverse work cultures benefit both workers and businesses, and the five-step process organizations can use to create them.

I asked Morales, author of the new book The Flexibility Paradigm: Humanizing the Workplace for Productivity, Profitability and Possibility: How should organizations be thinking about DEI at this moment?

"It all goes back to culture, who you are, and that at the end of the day, it's all about people. Who are your people? What do you stand for?" she said. "The problem right now is, we're constantly in reactivity mode. We don't know what's going to happen a year from now, four years from now. We're seeing executive orders and injunctions. Are you suddenly going to go in reverse? The question is: how do you stay true to who you are and what matters to you as an organization?

Because people are watching. They'll remember what you do right now."

Wise words.

As Williams said: "What works is developing targeted metrics to see whether what's going on is fair, and using evidence-based strategies, tweaking business systems to interrupt any unfairness you find. To accomplish that is not radical or on the cultural left.Providing more structure so people make business decisions based on actual evidence is not woke, it's sensible management. It's just good business."