DEI: Flawed and Maybe Ineffective
Are DEI programs hypocritical? Are they a waste of time and money? There's some evidence that they may be both.
Look at these three words: diversity, equity, inclusion. Separately, in lowercase, they suggest innocuous principles that are likely widely accepted. Put them together with capital letters—Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion—and they earn their own standalone moniker—DEI—and become a highly politicized policy. DEI has even become its own industry.
From whence DEI came
DEI traces its origins to the 1960s and the the Equal Pay Act of 1963, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Over time, DEI—though not yet with that label— expanded to include various identities beyond race, such as gender, sexual orientation, religion, and country of origin. Eventually, the focus shifted from simply changing laws to seeking more proactive policies, in particular affirmative action, in the workplaces, schools, and communities.
The introduction of equal employment laws and affirmative action marked the beginning of workplace diversity training—and the DEI industry. As the decades progressed, diversity training began to evolve. In the 1970s and 1980s, gender diversity education emerged. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the emergence of dedicated diversity professionals within organizations. These individuals played a crucial role in leading diversity initiatives and tailoring them to their organization’s specific needs. They often held titles like Chief Diversity Officer or Vice President of Diversity.
Initially, these training programs predominantly focused on racial discrimination. Employees underwent mandatory training sessions filled with workshops and questionnaires aimed at identifying personal biases…. Another strategy used to combat bias was the implementation of hiring tests. They were designed to assess candidates based on their skills and qualifications rather than their socioeconomic or racial backgrounds.
However, this method faced challenges. Studies found that this bias-focused training1 had little lasting impact, especially on white male employees who historically held more power within organizations.
The Aftermath of George Floyd
One of the main outcomes of the public reaction to the 2020 killing of George Floyd was what might be viewed as a “racial reckoning” when
corporations and universities rushed to issue public statements expressing not only their dedication to advancing racial justice, but also pledging to implement explicit diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives (DEI), such as the diversification of the workforce.
Surveys of international companies indicate that the number of people hired for jobs with "diversity" or "inclusion" in the title has more than quadrupled since 2010 and nearly doubled since 2020.
According to Harvard Kennedy School’s Iris Bohnet, U.S. entities alone spend roughly $8 billion a year on DEI training. This includes businesses, universities and government. One study looked at 65 large universities that together accounted for 16% of all higher-ed students. It found that the average university listed more than 45 people as having formal responsibility for promoting DEI goals. DEI staff listed by universities totaled 4.2 times the number of staff who assist students with disabilities in receiving reasonable accommodations. The U.S. Defense Department requested $114 million in the 2024 budget for DEIA training.2
As one example, the University of Michigan continues to exponentially grow the number of staffers dedicated to advancing DEI. At least 241 paid employees are now focused on DEI, and payroll costs exceed $30 million annually, according to an analysis conducted for The College Fix.
The payroll costs alone would cover in-state tuition and fees for 1,781 undergraduate students. UM’s Vice Provost for Equity and Inclusion & Chief Diversity Officer earns $402,800. Thirteen DEI staff members earn more than $200,000 and 66 earn more than $100,000 when factoring in benefits. In addition, 76 faculty or staff members work part-time as “DEI Unit Leads” advancing diversity efforts in one of UM’s 51 schools, colleges, and units, bringing UM’s core DEI headcount to 317, said economist Mark Perry, who conducted the analysis.
Are DEI programs effective?
The real problem is that there are little, if any, evidence-based findings that all the investment in DEI has been effective. Research summarized in a Harvard Business Review study in 2022 shows that “such training programs don’t lead to meaningful change. What’s necessary, say the authors, is a metrics-based approach that can identify problems, establish baselines, and measure progress.” In the absence of data on effectiveness, why do these programs survive?
Much of the answer has to do with risk. All too often, when an HR chief or a DEI head proposes a metrics-based plan for achieving DEI goals, it gets rejected because others in the company worry about the legal exposure it creates.
Indeed, a consensus now emerging among academics is that many anti-discrimination policies have no effect—or even backfire. “Some among them suspect the reason many interventions nevertheless remain popular is a hidden motive: that they are used not to reduce discrimination, but to shield against litigation.”
Nevertheless, we may have hit “peak DEI.” The number of organizations that have publicly announced they are formally or de facto abandoning DEI programs has cascaded in recent months: In its 2023 report, department store chain Nordstrom removed specific goals around diversity that had been in filings with the SEC since 2020. That same year, Workday “declared its commitments to increasing overall representation of Black and Latino employees in the U.S. by 30% and doubling the number of Black and Latino leaders by the end of last year. Those targets, added in 2022, were missing in 2023.”
Last month, Tractor Supply, a retail chain that sells home improvement equipment, livestock, and agricultural supplies for farmers and pet owners, announced it was “eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion roles; withdrawing carbon emission goals; and walking back support for the LGBTQ community as part of sweeping changes to environmental, social and governance initiatives.”
Tractor Supply said it’s making the changes to better represent the values of the communities and customers it serves. The retailer caters to largely rural communities, with 50,000 employees across 2,250 stores in 49 states, according to company data.
Even Harvard retreats
After George Floyd, many universities instituted a requirement similar to one employed at Harvard’s largest unit, its Faculty of Arts and Science: applicants for teaching positions had to submit an essay explaining how they would advance “diversity, inclusion, and belonging” in their work. Last month, following the lead of the University of North Carolina and Cambridge neighbor MIT, Harvard eliminated this mandate.
“By requiring academics to profess — and flaunt — faith in DEI, the proliferation of diversity statements poses a profound challenge to academic freedom,” Randall Kennedy, a scholar of race and civil rights at Harvard Law School, wrote in an April op-ed in the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper.
DEI and Antisemitism
One of the startling paradoxes of DEI World is that one of the most historically marginalized groups throughout history—the Jews— are generally not included under the umbrella of the DEI office, i.e., not considered in need of inclusion.
Much DEI training aims to raise awareness of biases, change attitudes, and indicate when, if at all, to take action when one observes biases. However, the training I have been subject to seems to center on gender, race, and ethnicity. Meanwhile, incidents of antisemitism were increasing gradually over the past decade before a draamatic increase in 2023, related to the Israeli’s response to the massacre by a Palestinian pogrom on October 7.
In the FBI’s collection of reported hate crimes with a religious basis, between 55% and 65% were against Jews, four to five times the number than against Muslims, the second most targeted group. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) reported a 140% increase in antisemitic incidents in 2023.
The DEI nexus with antisemitism was brought into stark relief in 2007 when Kamau Bobb. who later became head of DEI at Google. wrote in a blog post commenting on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians at the time:
If I were a Jew I would be concerned about my insatiable appetite for war and killing in defence of myself.
Today, he might have avoided even being reassigned by Google if he had used the cover of “Israelis” or “Zionists.” rather than “Jews.”
DEI, Antisemitism, and college campuses
Antisemitic incidents on college and university campuses in 2023 spiked by a substantial 321% to 922 incidents, most of which occurred after the October 7 terrorist attacks. This is concerning because “universities that consider themselves a beacon of social tolerance were becoming anxious places for Jews even before October 7, as reported by Armin Rosen in a 2022 essay in Tablet.
Over the past 18 months, a Torah scroll was desecrated during a break-in at a George Washington University Jewish fraternity, neo-Nazis beat up a Jewish student at the University of Central Florida, a participant in a Students for Justice in Palestine rally hurled rocks toward counterprotesters outside the University of Illinois Hillel, and the AEPi house at Rutgers was egged on Holocaust Remembrance Day for the second year in a row. Sexual assault survivors’ groups at both the University of Vermont and SUNY New Paltz banned Jews insufficiently hostile to Israel; a series of anti-Jewish threats, vandalism, and harassment seized Indiana University and the University of Wisconsin; and “long live the Intifada” was spray-painted in the middle of Boston University’s campus.
And yet—and this is really what I want to highlight—acts of antisemitism are not typically on the radar of DEI bureaucrats in that they are viewed as just about individual people and communities who are attacked rather than reflecting structural or systemic problems. Among the 65 large universities referenced earlier, there are nearly 3,000 employees dedicated to DEI.3 Collectively, these institutions had 1.4 DEI officers for every history professor and 3.4 DEI officials for every 100 tenured or tenure-track scholars in their employ.
Again, from Tablet:
Whereas racist flyers or epithets are held to automatically reflect centuries of legal discrimination and violence, the structural origins of antisemitism in the history of the West are ignored entirely. The incredible violence directed at Jews throughout the history of the West, culminating in the Holocaust, which is an event that happened in the lifetime of people still living on this earth; the mass ethnic cleansing of Jews from Arab countries; the overt, vile, legalized discrimination against American Jews in housing, education, private associations, and numerous other areas of American social life have all been amply documented by historians, Jewish and not, at every level of craft. If anyone has suffered from discrimination, violence, and social prejudice, across the broad expanse of Western history, surely Jews have.
A recent study made a stab at examining the extent to which DEI staff at universities express anti-Israel attitudes. It did a content analysis of the private Twitter (now X) accounts of 741 DEI staff at the 65 major universities and searched for comments related to Israel and, for comparison purposes, China. The findings are so out of proportion and imbalanced as to suggest they may constitute antisemitism.
DEI staff have a disproportionate interest in Israel relative to China and are far more likely to be critical of Israel than they are of China. In total, there were 633 tweets regarding Israel compared to 216 regarding China—three times as many—despite the fact that China is 155 times as populous as Israel and has 467 times the land mass. China has also had many reasons to be in the news recently, including being the origin of the pandemic, conducting a brutal crackdown on pro-democracy forces in Hong Kong, mass imprisonment and mistreatment of China’s Muslim Uyghur population, increasing confrontation with Taiwan and other countries in the Pacific Rim, and severe internal repression of political dissent and private corporations.
We would expect that anyone genuinely interested in human rights would have many more reasons to be paying attention to China than to Israel. And yet, “Of the 633 tweets regarding Israel, 605 (96 percent) were critical of the Jewish state. Of the 216 tweets regarding China, 133 (62 percent) expressed favorable sentiment.”
The study’s authors conclude:
Even if the hyperbolic and obsessive criticism of Israel expressed by university DEI staff did not meet the definition of antisemitism (which it clearly does), attacking a central feature of Jewish students’ identity would be entirely contrary to the stated purpose of having DEI staff: to welcome students from all backgrounds, make them feel included, and prevent or address incidents of hate and bias.
Are DEI programs hypocritical? Are they a waste of time and money?
Far be it for the Pancake to make a sweeping generalization in answer to either question. Nor is this post an exhaustive study of the subject. However, on the second question, there does seem to be a preponderance of empirical research that suggests that we are not getting enough bang for the buck. Positive advances in awareness and change in attitude derived from the $8 billion on DEI activities are minimal, at best.
Are the programs hypocritical? Again, I dare not paint all with the same brush. However, there is much anecdotal reporting that DEI is concerned with including and protecting some favored groups more than others. I suspect some of this stems from my hypothesis that many of those who choose careers in the DEI bureaucracy may tend to be from some of those constituencies that may feel they have the most to gain by furthering the selective aims of DEI World. Just a hypothesis.
Did this phrase sound okay to you, “biased-focused training?” Today I often hear it as “trainings,” as in “We’re going to have mandatory trainings this week.” That grates on me. Sure, there might be multiple sessions as part of the training. But the training is the top level. Am I right? (My Grammarly app thinks so: it underlines “trainings” for correction to ”training.”)
In some versions, an A for Accessibility has been tacked on: DEIA. This is similar to the growth of the initial LGB community, which has grown to LGBTIQA+, in both cases making the communities more inclusive.
If you clicked the link, you may have noticed that the study was conducted by The Heritage Foundation and published in July 2021. At the time, Heritage was a respectable conservative think tank. About two years ago, under new leadership, it took a hard MAGA turn and has taken the lead role in the 2025 Project.
Another very valuable Pancake on very difficult issues of social policy. Kudos for taking it head on.
There’s no question that DEI has gone way too far and deserves to be slashed. What started out as a good-faith effort to address systematic discrimination and exclusion morphed into an ideological behemoth that overwhelmed its good intentions. At best, DEI training was useless (I endured some of it), and at worst it backfired (as you noted).
I retired before the full DEI onslaught, but the University of Michigan’s investment in DEI is appalling, even if there’s a case for a smaller, more-focused DEI strategy. Take the DEI essays for academic hiring. I sat on several hiring committees (before and after retiring). The statements are and were ideological litmus tests that weren’t worth reading. Good riddance.
I certainly hope DEI has peaked. But I’m concerned about an overreaction back to the status quo ante, as reflected in the Tractor Supply company’s response. There’s room for targeted DEI and ESG efforts to address problems that require support from the public and private sectors to ameliorate.
As to the connection between DEI and antisemitism, I wouldn’t call it hypocritical (though I understand why it might be)—it’s much worse than that. For once I agree with Tablet/Armin Rosen. While DEI didn’t cause the spike in antisemitism, its refusal to recognize Jews as historical victims of discrimination and violence make a mockery of DEI’s claims, well, for DEI. DEI administrators’ anti-Israeli bias exacerbated the disgraceful protests and tepid administrative responses.
Revision: Another very valuable Pancake on a difficult set of social policy issues. Kudos for taking them head on.