In an acrobatically-impressive act of self-sabotage, 99% of America has pulled the rug from under its feet. Why 99%? That 1% will always be ok, don't worry. Today, we are talking about you, and how that rug really tied the room together.
Let's get something out of the way first. Since it's caused such a stir, let's break down the DEIB alphabet soup for the people in the back, so that we're all on the same page.
Diversity simply means that the employee population in a given company and location is approximately representative of the candidate pool (all of the working-age people in that area). Why? Because if there are entire populations that an employer is not managing to appeal to, there is probably something seriously wrong with their pay, benefits, working environment, products, reputation, marketing or other aspects. It is a symptom of a broken business, that will lead to missed opportunities, stagnation and ultimately poor commercial performance. Which means everyone can lose their jobs, regardless of what community they are a part of. The area's economy will take a dive. Your town's taxes will fall short of funding your kids' school. Your kids will not have remotely the same opportunities you did. Sound familiar? It's a whole chain reaction. This is why paying attention to symptoms of business issues, like repelling qualified employees for any reason at all, benefits everyone.
Inclusion can be boiled down to these aspects:
every person is treated with respect and civility (and shares a basic understanding of what that means)
every person has the same opportunities, where career decisions are based solely on merit (as opposed to ANY one group being given preference, contrary to a popular myth);
It is acknowledged that people have different needs and perspectives and it is their basic right to be accommodated;
The company's management and leadership population is representative of what the rest of the employee population looks like. If an entire group, let's say employees living with disabilities, are continuously denied promotion, it is a really good idea to track this data and look into it.
Why? Decades of research tell us that companies with inclusive work environments perform better. Respectful, competent colleagues make your life easier. Merit-based rewards make your life a little bit more fair. Ability to get accommodations like a desk riser for your bad back, benefits like parental leave for your new offspring, programs like floating holidays to practice your religious beliefs, improve your quality of life. Teams that encourage and include diverse perspectives create and market better products. Without making inclusion an expectation at work, these things do not happen. If Coca-Cola incorporated culturally inclusive perspectives when trying to break into the Chinese market in 1928, maybe the characters they chose for their campaign would not literally read as "bite the wax tadpole." If Burger King ran its scholarship program for female chefs campaign by more women in 2021, maybe they would not have ended up with a tagline that said "Women Belong in the Kitchen." When marketing spectacularly fails, products suffer, bottom line suffers, people lose their jobs and we are back to the chain reaction. Inclusion benefits everyone.
Equity starts with recognizing that we do not all start out in the same place. There are systemic barriers and disparities that prevent certain groups from having equal access to opportunities. For example, people with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) are notoriously underemployed because traditional interview processes that value personality, small talk and other social fluff over hard skills are designed to filter them out. Qualified people miss out on jobs, and companies miss out on often gifted, dedicated, innovative and detail-oriented minds. Adjusting interview processes to focus on technical skills for technical jobs levels the playing field to help people get in the door. Once through the door, adjusting the work environment by providing quiet, distraction-free, sensory-friendly spaces allows people with sensory issues to do their best work. It takes nothing away from candidates and employees who do not need the help.
If you are in the "equity programs create an unfair advantage" camp, remember that equitable employer benefits are not pie. You don't get less benefits and opportunities because there are more options for others. In fact, everyone is getting more pie. The difference is, if you walk into the kitchen but cannot reach the counter, you can't have the pie. Is lowering the counter unfair to tall people? No, they can still reach it. Saying it is unfair to lower the counter is like saying wheelchair ramps are an unfair advantage that discriminates against people who can walk. It is like saying parental leave is unfair to people without kids. It is like saying if I don't celebrate Christmas, no one should get that day off (instead of saying, give everyone a floating holiday to honor their traditions). In other words, stop it, you sound ridiculous. Eat your pie. Equity benefits everyone.
Belonging is simply the desired outcome of the above programs that was added to the acronym in recent years. It means you don't hate your job. When you don't hate your job, you show up, you want to be there, you get your shit done, you get along with other humans and if you're lucky, don't have to put a mask on and pretend to be someone you are not to be allowed to earn income. You also don't bash your company on social media after hours, which helps them continue to recruit and retain qualified people. Again, win-win. I think we can all agree that no one sets out to hate their job, while everyone wants to earn an income.
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Now on to the important part. If you are a parent, woman, veteran, person living with disabilities, ethnic, religious or social minority, or a two-legged human trying to make a living, this is for you. The national DEI conversation has had its gears jammed on race and gender-affirming care so much that it has left out some of the biggest groups of humans. Therefore, we will focus on three of those groups here – the challenges in the workplace and how Human Resources has been mitigating those challenges for everyone's benefit.
50.5% of Americans are Women.
In 2021-2022, American women earned the majority of post-secondary degrees at every level, including 62.6% of master's degrees and 57% of doctoral degrees. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they make up 47% of the workforce. In 2023, women working full-time, year-round earned approximately 83 cents for every dollar earned by men. The gap actually widened by a penny that year, compared to 2022. The leadership gap is much more steep. Women hold roughly 35% to 42% of management positions, and just 10% of the CEO positions in Fortune 500 companies as of 2024. A Harvard Business Review study in 2016 found that there are more CEOs named Dave than there are CEOs who are women. It takes women longer to arrive at leadership roles with the same or higher credentials.
Clearly, this is not a skill or capability gap. This has to do with one of those pesky systemic barriers and disparities we talked about above. Without intervention, the employment, pay, and leadership gaps do not change or get worse. So, what do equity programs do for women?
We track and look at the data - because we cannot fix problems we don't know about
We seek out candidates of all genders or use blind resume screening
We train interviewers to conduct fair and unbiased interviews focusing on skills and qualifications, not stereotypes
We conduct salary reviews to identify and fix pay gaps
We implement transparent pay structures and compensation practices
We write policies to require equitable and respectful treatment for all employees, including women
We ensure qualified women are considered for advancement during succession planning
We ensure women are offered the same professional and leadership development opportunities, and are considered for nominations into high-potential programs at a similar rate
We offer flexible work arrangement so that you can take care of your personal life
We measure and report on our progress
America, this conversation isn't about overthrowing the patriarchy and burning the bras. This is about the basic capitalist principle of rewarding merit and accumulating worth based on the value generated. The 10 things above also happen to benefit the next group on this list: working parents.
40% of Americans are Parents.
Congratulations on reproducing and turning your life upside down. According to Business Insider, you live in the 2nd worst country to raise a child of the 35 developed countries compared, where 23% of household income goes toward childcare costs, homicide and maternal mortality rates are massive, and the GINI income inequality index is 45 out of 63. You can read the article here.
Juggling work while taking care of brand new humans is one of the many challenges. What have equity programs achieved for parents?
Paid parental leaves for births and adoptions
Lactation rooms as well as lactation breaks that are currently mandated by law
Flexible work arrangements
Caregiver benefits such as discounted emergency sitters
In some cases, onsite daycare programs
Things are a bit better than they were but there is a lot of opportunity. U.S. is a long way from catching up to EU parental programs. For example, in Ukraine, the paid leave is 126 days at 100% salary and unpaid leave is up to 3 years with job security. U.S. will not get there without an ongoing focus on equity.
20% of Americans Live with Disabilities - Visible or Invisible.
The numbers vary depending on the definitions used and the severity of impact to daily functioning. Under U.S. law, primarily the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), a person with a disability is defined as someone who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities, a record of such impairment, or is regarded as having such an impairment.
Historically, people living with disabilities faced significant barriers to securing and maintaining employment, resulting in high rates of un- or under-employment, often leading to economic disparities. Those barriers have ranged from outright discrimination and negative attitudes to lack of accessibility and support services. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the unemployment rate for people with disabilities was 7.5% in 2024, approximately twice as high as the rate of those without disabilities (3.8%). What are some examples of how equity programs help this community?
Ensuring job postings and interview processes are accessible
Training interviewers and hiring managers on disability awareness and how to conduct fair and unbiased interviews focusing on skills and qualifications
Collaborating with local disability organizations to access a wider pool of qualified candidates
Offering disability benefits and types of sick time that go beyond the required minimum
Providing physical environments where everyone is able to do their best work (for example, sensory-friendly quiet spaces, alternative input devices, or dietary-restriction-friendly event food)
Providing multiple ways to access important information regardless of visual or hearing impairment (for example, subtitles on all corporate communication)
Working with employees to understand their needs and offer reasonable accommodations
Offering remote work, flex hours, job sharing and other alternative arrangements
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We could continue to talk about Americans who are veterans (6.1%), people living with mental health issues (23%) , people not affiliated with Christian branches of religion (32%), non-white, Hispanic or Latino people of color (12%) and LGBTQ+ (7.6%) populations, but hopefully you get the point – equity programs are the opposite of "unfair advantage," they benefit everyone and are the epitome of enacting merit-based practices.
Now consider that most people are members of multiple groups, each one multiplying their barriers to fruitful employment. Veterans of color. Disabled parents. Queer women. What it means in practice is working that much harder to get a seat at the same table.
In 2018, Mine Rights Technologies paid $75K to settle a discrimination lawsuit involving harassment of Jason Kauffman, a veteran with PTSD. Jason is one of the many faces of diverse backgrounds at work, who deserved to make a living. For every Jason, there are multitudes of people whose struggles and discriminatory treatment will continue unmitigated if the (just as underpaid and tired) human resources warriors are not allowed to do their jobs.
Any organization that flaunts respect in the workplace as one of its values has to understand that respect is systemic and is created or destroyed by the everyday practices and policy. When great employees are placed in a bad system, the system wins every time. Equity programs define what respect looks like for all employees.
How do we know what it should look like? We ask you. That's where the Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) come in. They are venues to advocate for a particular group's needs based on lived experience. And no, having one big group doesn't get that job done. People without lived experience of having children cannot fully advocate for people with children. People with no military (or female, or queer, or Asian) lived experience cannot fully advocate for people with that daily lived experience. There are plenty of examples of this. (Remember companies coming out with soap dispensers that were unable to detect dark skin?)
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Let's say you get this far and you still want every DEI department shut down. Then one day, you realize you were wrong and ask for it back. Here is the thing about human progress. It is very hard to make and very easy to lose. It's a bit like a videogame where when you die, you always respawn at the beginning of the level. Once you dismantle the people, resources, infrastructure and hard-won legislation that made your life not suck in 2024, you respawn somewhere around 1876. (May the smallpox odds be ever in your favor).
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That's it. Here are the key points I want you to walk away with.
YOU are the "diversity hire" DEI programs are designed to benefit. Whoever you are.
When you don't understand "what HR is doing back there" and why - ask. Seriously, call me, I will explain it to you honestly, slowly, and multiple times.
Every time you assume bad intent without any data, and it results in hateful knee-jerk reactions, your respective deity of choice kills 100 puppies. True story - it was right there on the Snapple cap.