A majority of Americans across nearly all demographic groups said DEI initiatives have made no impact on their personal careers, according to a newly released Harris Poll/Axios Vibes survey.
Why it matters: Republican lawmakers and activists have vilified DEI, a term for diversity, equity and inclusion policies used by employers. Companies have responded by rolling back programs.
- Yet Americans — and businesses — have a generally positive to at least indifferent view on the subject.
- On balance, most demographic groups were more likely to say DEI benefited their career than hindered it.
Business should be looking for the best candidates wherever they can find them. Well structured DEI policies do not contradict that. In fact, they lead to better candidates all around, because they encourage hiring managers to look at the entire diverse pool of candidates.
I feel the anti-diversity crusaders have a zero-sum view of the world, where there is only one best candidate (who coincidentally looks like they do) and if someone else gets a job over them it must mean that the scales were tipped somehow. In reality, though, there can be multiple best candidates, and where there are, it’s entirely appropriate to bring in someone who can provide a different point of view.
I mean, this is basically Clarence Thomas’ entire character arc. He fought through a lot of adversity as a child (both due to his poor upbringing and outright racism) and was actually quite active in the civil rights movement. He got his law degree at Yale, only to find the racist people running the law firms at the time didn’t believe he was that smart, and only got his degree because of affirmative action. Yet somehow, instead of blaming the racist fucks for being so racist, he blamed Yale for admitting him in the first place. Somehow getting reverse brainwashed into promoting the agendas of people he hated.
Under today’s DEI policies, law firms would be actively looking for the next Clarence Thomas, not because they need to fill a quota with a Black man, but because they know the next star legal minds could come from anywhere, so they need to make sure they don’t accidentally exclude anyone.
This may seem uninvuitive to some people, but it makes sense when you consider that two candidates might be not directly comparable. Eg. one is better at task X and worse at task Y, and the other is the opposite. DEI encourages weighting different strengths in a particular way, so accounting for it may cause you to choose a different “best” candidate than if you had weighted their strengths differently.