DEI isn't racist. The people who say it is often are.
As someone who has worked in "DEI," broadly speaking, for almost 15 years, here's what right-wing propagandists get so, so wrong and why we actually do need DEI.
Right wing propaganda will have you believing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives (DEI) are reverse racism, taking opportunities away from white people. As someone who has been doing work that would now be classified as “DEI” for almost fifteen years, I can confidently say that has never been how it has been conceptualized or implemented by anyone I know.
What, even, is DEI?
Last week, the Trump administration put out two separate executive orders (EOs) banning DEI. One, “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” was focused on the federal government and required all DEI offices, positions, actions, programs, or initiatives rescinded be terminated. A memorandum from the Office of Personnel Management required all employees working in DEI-related roles to be placed on leave by 5 pm last Wednesday and that there be a plan for “reduction-in-force” by 5 pm January 31, 2025. In other words, they will all be fired.
The other EO, titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity,” sought to force every entity, whether in higher education or industry, to eliminate DEI in all forms. It’s important to note they included “accessibility” under this ban, putting the EO at odds with the Americans with Disabilities Act unless they are going to eliminate that next. This order also rescinded Lyndon B. Johnson’s equal employment executive order that banned discrimination in federal employment and contracting. Importantly, neither EO defined what DEI is. This allowed someone at the San Antonio-Lackland Joint Base, where new recruits are trained, to interpret the order to mean they should no longer teach about the Tuskegee Airmen (the first Black Air Force pilot) or the Women Airforce Service Pilots (read the Tuskegee Airmen, Inc.’s response here). So now teaching history that involves anyone other than white men is “DEI”? Thankfully, after outrage online and “careful review,” both parts of the curriculum have now been reinstated.
Is research to address health disparities considered “DEI”? Researchers all over the country are asking ourselves this because of rumors suggesting the Health and Human Services (HHS) freeze, which affects such agencies as the NIH, the FDA, and the CDC, is happening right now to ensure there are no “DEI” activities in HHS. If that’s the case, they are seemingly willing to put medical treatments including even cancer research on hold to pursue their vendetta against DEI. If so, are they reviewing every grant to see if it involves DEI? What will happen to the grants they think fall into that category? Let’s review my grant as an example. I have a grant worth over $2 million from the NIH to study an intervention to reduce sexual harassment in biomedical research. The grant was funded related to a Notice of Special Interest put out by the NIH back in 2021 seeking proposals related to sexual harassment. We are currently in the third year of a five-year grant.
The progress report on our grant is due every spring, and the NIH determines the amount they will pay for the following year. What will happen this year after we submit our progress report? It is possible they decide to terminate the grant. In the meantime, I have spent the last couple of months interviewing candidates to join the team. Should I hire one of them, knowing we may not have funds beyond a few months? Does our team continue to work understaffed? This is obviously very destabilizing, but we would not be the first ones to have our grant terminated.
If we take a step back, is sexual harassment part of “DEI”? Is eliminating illegal discriminatory behavior at work, which sexual harassment is, part of “DEI”? Certainly, one cannot have an equitable or inclusive workplace if sexual harassment is tolerated. Given what we know about the likelihood of those who have been harassed to leave organizations, and the fact that women and sexual and gender minorities are most likely to experience sexual harassment, allowing sexual harassment also likely decreases gender diversity in the workplace. So, yes, I do think the government would classify this as “DEI,” and I am waiting for our work to find itself on the cutting room floor.
By the way, we submitted another grant in the fall as an extension of this work. With study sections (the panel meetings where expert scientists review and rate grant applications) on hold, it’s not clear if/when that grant will be reviewed. Even if study sections resume soon, which we hope they will, will my grant just not be scored (meaning it doesn’t even get discussed and therefore cannot be funded) because of the topic?
These are all questions I have been asking myself for the past week. And, as one of my followers asked on Bluesky, does all of this mean I will lose my job? I hope not, but like some of the other 300,000 people funded by the NIH, I don’t know. These are the folks pushing boundaries in medical research, trying to address difficult problems such as finding cures for cancer, treating infectious diseases, and resolving health disparities. Imagine all of them going through the same experience as I, wondering what will become of their research based on the whims of ill-informed leadership, and the amount of lost productivity combined. Of note, there is a National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities–will this institute be dissolved? The National Academies put out a scathing report on the state of women’s health research at the NIH just last month, calling for almost $16 billion more in the coming five years. But the new administration seems poised to close the only dedicated resource we have, which is the Office for Research on Women’s Health.
Why Do We Need DEI?
People love to mention the “DEI training” they had that sucked. It was “tone deaf” or too simple or condescending or annoying or it made them feel bad (oh no! How dare they make us uncomfortable?!?). I’ll be the first to admit there is wide variability in which speakers are brought in and what kinds of educational sessions are implemented in different workplaces. It is important to note, however, these sessions are not the only thing we do in DEI. And even if they were, does attending one suboptimal session mean we should throw out the entire endeavor? I don’t think any rational person would answer “yes” to that question.
In addition to education, a successful DEI program should be looking at policies and procedures to make sure they minimize biases and disparities. This might include, for example, looking at pay disparities and examining the processes for promotions and selection for leadership opportunities. Traditionally, this has included looking at hiring procedures to make sure they are as equitable as possible, including posting job ads in multiple locations to attract candidates from various backgrounds, checking whether the language used in a job ad may unintentionally turn certain groups of candidates off, and making sure the hiring criteria are preset and transparent.
A recent article in teen vogue highlighted why work like this is needed. Aliyah Jones, a Black woman, was searching for work for months when she started applying to jobs as Emily Osbourne, “a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white woman.” Over the course of more than 300 job applications, Emily was invited to interviews almost 60% of the time, while Aliyah, with the same resume, was invited about 9% of the time. Aliyah also found that during the interview process, she was more likely to be asked to do additional labor, such as assignments and case studies, than was “Emily.” You might shrug off Aliyah’s experiment because it is anecdotal. But research bears out her findings. Back in 2004, a classic experiment in which researchers submitted applications to job ads with identical qualifications but with different names (Emily, Greg, Lakisha, or Jamal) found Emily and Greg were 50% more likely to be invited for an interview than Lakisha or Jamal. In a more recent study, published last year, Brad, Greg, Amanda, and Kristen were 9% more likely to be invited for an interview than were Darnell, Lamar, Ebony, and Latoya, again with the same exact qualifications. This racial gap was up to 24% among the companies that performed the worst. Anyone who is genuinely concerned about meritocracy or “hiring the best people” should be concerned by these findings and want to address them.
But the people who are up in arms about meritocracy and the hiring of “unqualified” people are very quiet about a Black and Asian woman who had experience in every branch of government being cast aside for an older white man whose main qualification is wealth and white maleness. They also aren’t saying much about the gap in qualifications between Lloyd J. Austin III, our former Secretary of Defense who had served at all levels of the military–from Brigade Commander all the way up to Vice Chief ofSstaff of the army, Chief of Staff for US Central Command, and four-star general–and the current Secretary of Defense who has, he wants you to know, served in the army…and been forced out of leadership roles in not one, but two separate veterans non-profits. If a “DEI hire” is someone who is hired despite being unqualified, Hegseth sure fits the bill–and he’s far from the only one in Trump’s administration. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a man with no scientific or medical expertise who is most famous for opposing the largest public health improvement of all time (vaccines), is up for confirmation for Secretary of Health and Human Services this week.
The reality is we are all, even at our best, biased. DEI is about helping us counteract our own biases by putting in place procedures that shortcut these biases. The only people who are threatened by that are people who don’t want to give up their unearned privilege. How insecure do you have to be, how little must you think of yourself to believe the only way you can get a job is if DEI is gone?
Follow the Bankers
Much has been made in the last week about Costco’s decision to continue their DEI programs and, by contrast, Target’s decision to “roll back” theirs. To be clear, as I’ve said before, eliminating DEI is an attempt to resegregate our society, as are the EOs banning DEI. Why else would they try to get rid of laws banning discrimination? We really need everyone to put on their thinking caps now. Do not be fooled by rhetoric about DEI being racist. Stop and think for a moment. Why would, for example, a hospital hire incompetent physicians? Even if you pretend they don’t actually care about patients, they would be exposing themselves to malpractice lawsuits. Why would they do that? Why would a company such as JP Morgan or Goldman Sachs (both of which have continued their commitment to DEI) hire a less effective banker? They are certainly not driven by interest in kindness or justice. They only care about one thing–their bottom line. And they know, if nothing else, excluding large segments of the workforce is simply bad for business.
Vote With Your Feet
So where does that leave us now? Many are calling for a boycott of Target. While you’re at it, please add Amazon to your list. In addition, we need to keep pushing back on the attacks on DEI because they won’t stop there. People have accused me of fearmongering for sharing a post saying what the current administration is doing is not about corporate “trainings”--it is about civil rights. But this is actually our (very sad, very embarrassing, very shameful) reality. The EO about sex and gender is an attempt to erase trans and intersex people completely, leading Secretary of State Marco Rubio to suspend processing of all passports requesting an “X” sex marker or to change the sex marked on their passport. Also, the Department of Labor has issued a “cease and desist” order for “investigative and enforcement activity” related to the equal employment EO. In other words, they have ordered all investigations related to discrimination to stop. And, tens of millions of people are not on board with any of this! So, at the risk of echoing Jennifer Lopez, let’s make ourselves loud. Protest, boycott, contact your members of Congress, write what you think on social media, spend your freezing, explain to the people in your lives the scope of what is happening–just do something, please.
My colleague Dr. Thanh Neville wrote on Bluesky over the weekend, “I have no intention of going quietly into the night.” Neither do I. I know we cannot fix everything at once, but if we cannot step up for each other’s civil rights, I fear we are completely lost.
Update: Just after publishing this post, I saw a new memo from the administration freezing quite a lot of federal spending, including grants. This is concerning in a number of ways, including that it is not within the president’s purview to withhold funds allotted by Congress. As I had suggested above, it appears they are asking agencies to review all their funding to make sure they are not spending any money toward DEI-related work: “Federal agencies must temporarily pause all activities related to obligation or disbursement of all Federal financial assistance, and other relevant agency activities that may be implicated by the executive orders, including, but not limited to, financial assistance for foreign aid, nongovernmental organizations, DEI, woke gender ideology, and the green new deal…Each agency must pause: (i) issuance of new awards; (ii) disbursement of Federal funds under all open awards; and (iii) other relevant agency actions that may be implicated by the executive orders, to the extent permissible by law, until OMB has reviewed and provided guidance to your agency with respect to the information submitted.” It seems Medicare and Social Security funding will continue, but there is no explicitly stated exception for Medicaid. Stay tuned.
Everyday is worse than the day before.