In 2020, a powerful and terrible confluence of events -- the pandemic, the wildly accelerated pace of digitization and above all the murder of George Floyd in America by a police officer, visible to hundreds of millions of people in homes around the world, crystallized into a moment.
Structural barriers came into pin sharp focus and companies began to consider the diversity and equity of their workforces. Data was scrutinized, DEI professionals were hired at pace, and employees got a lot pickier about corporate culture. Progressive hopes were high.
Too high, as it turned out. After four years of bitterly fought culture wars, botched unconscious bias training and a ton of woke washing, all the available data suggests that when it comes to tech, very little of substance has changed. Tech is barely more diverse than it was in 2018; by some measures, it's less so.
The backlash against DEI is well entrenched, with those who have always opposed it using the lack of progress to prove they were right all along. Progressives are left wondering, again, why others can't see what seems so obvious to them. The moral arc of the universe may well bend towards justice, but must it take quite so long?
Failure starts at the top
Why has DEI failed to usher in a golden era where all members of a diverse workforce are equally supported, heard and valued by their employers?
It's tempting to blame reactionary forces. You only have to look at the way measures like diverse interview panels are misrepresented as "reverse discrimination" or social engineering to see that many who benefit from the status quo aren't going to play nicely when it's challenged. But as an explanation of why DEI has failed, it falls short.
We need to start at the top. Tech executive boards have been signaling for some time their understanding that they "need to do better" on a whole raft of diversity metrics, but has this extended to making meaningful change in their own ranks? Not so much.
At the executive level, boards have been very supportive of change -- but only for their subordinates. Their own composition remains much as it ever was, primarily white and male. The message is clear: change is someone else's problem.
This mindset led to the hurried recruitment of DEI professionals, but not their support or in many cases proper funding. Boards have been persuaded by the economic arguments for greater diversity, but instead of changing their own behavior and taking on the challenging task of organizational change themselves, they looked to DEI professionals to implement it for them.
As Ashleigh Ainsley, CEO of Colorintech, pointed out in a recent interview with Computing that vanishingly few boards tied executive pay and bonuses to diversity metrics. It's so much easier to incorporate a rainbow into a company logo and tweet some cut and paste platitudes on International Women's Day.
Lower layers of management were asked to rebalance their teams, examine their unconscious biases, look out for microaggressions and make greater efforts to listen to women, to employees from ethnic minorities and to the LGBTQIA+ community - but without the accompanying understanding that implementing change is always demanding. It needs time and an abundance of good faith. The time and good faith were often in short supply.
Because DEI teams weren't being properly supported, they were simply viewed as the diversity police. Those at the top of organisations failed to sell DEI to workforces and take people with them.
The result in many workplaces has been a confused and hostile vacuum where misunderstanding, misinformation and resentment about the motives and purpose of DEI has propagated. Meanwhile, the board is looking at employee data and wondering what exactly the DEI people it hired have achieved, hence the growing scale of redundancies in this field.
Share the wealth
At the same time, many of the people who are working to make their workplaces more inclusive might also be inadvertently derailing their own efforts.
To be clear, the homogeneity of the tech workforce should be challenged. Diverse workforces and management make better decisions, and there is a commercial and above all a moral imperative for businesses making technology that is reshaping every aspect of society to make sure that technology works for everyone. This editorial is not arguing otherwise.
But those advocating greater diversity also have to take some responsibility for DEI's failure. The tactics and tools DEI teams used to chisel away at what they perceive to be a system rigged in favour of someone else haven't done anything more than scratch the surface.
By presenting one group as unworthy winners and everyone else as losers in a system they have no agency over, the stage was set for a battle. DEI was always going to be on the losing side.
If we want to exact real and lasting change, people need to feel secure, and they need to be inspired to not so much "pass the privilege" (a genuinely terrible slogan) but share the wealth. It isn't a coincidence that most of the great movements for social change had their breakthroughs during times of economic growth.
It's a tough call when the global economic outlook remains so fragile, but with great leadership from the top, and more positive framing of DEI, it's still possible.
This article originally appeared in Computing UK' IT Essentials Newsletter.
