DEI - To be or Not to be

• Why talk about DEI

Somewhere in the last 2 decades all corporates started catering to a new directive principle called D.E.I or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at the workplace. All employees are now increasingly subjected to hours of DEI trainings. (I have been out of the corporate workforce for over an year now, but I speak from over 20+ years of experience, across at least 5 different MNC's). To push the D.E.I agenda companies conduct Live sessions. Virtual sessions. Mandatory trainings and certifications, though its still not clear how anyone is qualified to certify anyone as DEI approved and based on what?! A frantic wave of D.E.I indoctrination has spread across the globe. From a DEI training that got introduced as a fringe best practice to adopt, once an year, in early 2000s to it becoming a weekly email blast and mandate right at the employee desk, DEI wields big muscle now! The biggest CEOs across USA and Europe especially, bend their knee in submission to DEI initiatives, though it is not yet any sort of a legal mandate. But because most major political groups make a show of pushing it, most major corporates and activist groups incessantly making a noise about it, DEI is something no one can ignore.

If they do resist or question, they find themselves ostracized and publicly bullied by the organized DEI lobby. Purely from an academic sense, DEI is a lesson to those observing, how to make something a mandate and a practice in effect on ground without passing it as a law/regulation in Parliament. DEI then is a great example that actual outcomes are achieved by relentless implementation on ground, and not by stating or declaring something ought to be practiced henceforth. In short practice overrides policy. Culture or enforced habits win over declared objectives. DEI will probably become a law when the practical adoption becomes even more pervasive and all resistance is crushed.

As an employee, I would notice multiple groups within the organization (HR, CSR, Workplace Sensitivity Team, blah blah) would take it upon themselves to become D.E.I Champions. While each of us dealt with work pressure and having to upgrade work related skills, there seemed to be a whole lot of people hired only to evangelize and preach D.E.I propaganda only. They seemed to have no other job but to make endless PPTs on DEI and related mandates, fancily arrange meeting venues which may include gift merchandize to participate and promote DEI (how were they getting budgeted?), and the only skill set DEI champs had seems to be that they should be aggressive, enthusiastic sales persons, of all shapes, sizes, genders, who somehow got hired & who could make PPTs and happily give DEI sermons to educate adult employees, who have been through school and college at their own expense and pay income tax for work they do. The spent their own money for skills they have worked hard to acquire, are responsible enough to work under all sorts of stress to deliver value to earn that salary, but now also have to submit to be instructed on how to show that they and their organization is more DEI compliant. While in the Quarterly or Annual townhalls we were told that we wont get a bonus this year or promotions this cycle because the company did badly, or economy was a challenge, and while we were constantly seeing layoffs in our verticals, the DEI team which brought zero revenue and was an overhead department, constantly grew and seemed to be immune to layoffs and probably even earned bonuses! Who knows. For all the declarations of core value of transparency, no organization actually shares compensation data across employee and band levels ever! Clearly it is better to be a DEI advocate with basic PPT making skills than work hard to be a otherwise skilled professional. Clearly! Hmm.

Some of us asked, why we are being constantly bombarded by this DEI training. If organization wants diversity, HR & Recruitment should be trained to hire accordingly. Who is stopping them from hiring as per DEI principles? Employees have no union or say in hiring anyways. Maybe to an extent (depending on the organizations culture around this) Senior Leadership can have a say in recruitment, but still never single handedly. They too only have an input in the hiring process flow. So why is each and every employee now, trained on DEI incessantly?

I remember looking around at my fellow colleagues. Some, used to never questioning the status quo or organizational politics, would quietly sit or sleep through these sessions. Some listened keenly, and being sharp at seeing future prospects they quickly walked up to their bosses and asked to be transferred to a role in the DEI team. Some looked around baffled. I was one of those baffled ones.

I wondered why anyone thought they had the right to instruct me on inclusivity in this weird propogandist manner, just because I was employed to do a specific skill related job, which I did and for which I was hired based on qualification and experience. Last I checked, our pay check included no component for us to listen to Inclusivity lectures, Gender Fluidity & sensitivity sermons, religious, cultural and political opinions to have or not have. But that is what the workplace has become now. American & European Leftist Political and activist agendas are imposed on everyone globally now!

While being hired, none of us was asked about who we would vote for. What our political ideas if any were. What our ideas on race are. What our religious passions are. How spiritual are we. What our sexual preferences and Gender pronouns were. What we thought of Abortion or Donald Trump! But once in, we are entrapped to submit to a strange global political agenda driven primarily by USA politics! As an Indian what do I even care about Donald Trump or Roe V Wade!!!!?!!

Before DEI we already had workplace ethics trainings in place. And several other HR initiatives to make workplace safe for all, including women and persons with disabilities. How is Racial and Sexual Diversity an employee's goal now? I never quite understood! This DEI crept up. Rome wasn't built in a day. Neither was WOKE. It's all insidiously built up. They worked out the threats and the slurs first.

• Why WOKE

What is WOKE? As per Chat GPT, "The term "woke" originally comes from African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and means being awake to social injustices and systemic inequalities, particularly related to race. The term gained prominence in the 2010s, especially through social media, where it was used to describe an awareness of and activism against racial and social injustices..."

If you resist being WOKE in any shape or form (being confused and questioning is deemed being anti-woke), you then are deemed to be a racist, a bigot, and now a transphobe. (It's meaning, scope and purview keep expanding like our universe). That is the first line of attack. Then come the threats of workplace hostility, cancel culture and losing your job. If there is a protest they appoint a investigating committee with no democracy. You have to accept that they are who they claim to be. How they decide on the issue doesn't matter, because they are not required to be transparent. They decide and declare. Dissent is not tolerated. Questioning is penalized, invisibly if not openly. If you question or challenge, your only option is to get cancelled. Classic bullying is now institutionalized top down in all corporates.

• WOKEness and DEI

So, as an organization, you want to make sure you give all races a equitable chance now? Ah. So not Equal, Equitable. Someone somewhere decided that in order to appear like you are serious about Diversity and Inclusion you must have more employees of a certain race and gender and sexual preference type. Basically show Equity of a certain group as a stake. Suddenly (though the exact ratio of this DEI cocktail is not known to anyone on earth) , if you appear progressively woke, you are DEI approved. Like Disney. It seems to have become a new woke culture machine now. It's profits have soared and all it's employees are so happy (*Not! That was sarcastic).

A personal anecdote. Will call this company XYZ, somewhere in USA. We all were part of this software dev & implementation team. One of the team members was a person we shall call AA. AA was African American & male. (one tick on the diversity quota of Race). In a global female team of various nationalities and ethnicities, an automatically diverse group, AA was that extra bit. AA was not great at the job. AA knew it. Everyone else also knew it. In fact AA did not care and often didn't even show up to work for days at a time. Attendance was self reported on time sheets and no one cross validated it with biometric records. Also colleagues were chill and no one made a fuss. When he did show up at office, you mostly then saw his bag at the desk while he went around doing coffee station rounds, genially networking across the building floors. AA was nice enough to meet & greet but utterly disinterested to sit & work. The remaining team often did extra hours to straighten up stuff AA did. In fact all were happier when AA didn't work, including AA. Strangely, no one really resented AA getting paid for not really working. We should have, but being automatically tolerant inclusive people we let it be. Of course, when you are genuinely tolerant & inclusive does anyone reward you in life? No. Anyways, we all subconsciously knew complaining would only backfire because being black was now a super power in any workplace in USA. We knew this because of constant DEI & CRT etc. trainings we all were subjected to.

Racial identity is a huge thing in USA. In fact I have never heard so much talk of race anywhere else on earth. It also always baffled me. Most of us in India I feel don't care about skin color. As an Indian I am automatically used to it. From my extended family, down to my fellow citizens, I see all skin colors and tones, three genders (because India has always recognized Male, Female and Other) and we just don't publicly discuss sex life. Mostly people in India have the common sense to not socially discuss religion or politics. Everyone minds their own business. As a nation we have every possible religion and the common sense as a whole generally speaking to stay out of another's personal business! As long as you are my colleague, I need to treat you professionally and after that your personal life is yours and mine is mine. No Corporate or any type of organization should come into socio personal life of anyone. But American companies don't believe in that principle! They have appointed themselves the churches of the religion of DEI now.

Coming from India where the political left and the western world constantly tries to belittle us by saying we had the discriminatory caste based class system, this DEI seems to me to be a very specific example of the SAME. In DEI the higher Class is the right intersection of Race/Gender Identity Card. Race card has a certain value. Just a bit ahead is the Race + Gender card. Now the highest in the order is the Trans-Gender + Race card. And if you are a certain Race +Trans Gender you have won the very lottery! What you do, or can can or cannot do at work does not matter anymore. Your identity (the new privilege) now Trumps everything. Of course if you also openly hate Donald Trump you are anointed into DEI Sainthood.

Ah Donald Trump! Even if you are not an American, if you work for an American firm, it is now subliminally understood you must hate Donald Trump. why? Just because all the WOKE hate Trump so all employees of all these WOKE organizations also must! God forbid anyone hears you mention that you don't hate trump. Word gets around. All your diversity hired woke colleagues will hate you. Openly or quietly in the woke non-binary people club they form. You will lose your bonus, your growth and eventually your job. Listen to the conversations across social media platforms; X, YouTube, FB, Reddit, etc. A lot of People are fed up of this wokeness. But they are scared to voice it openly.

• Ok, so WOKE is dominating. BUT is WOKE good.

Let's analyze this logically. DEI hiring is a direct attack on the earlier so called Merit based hiring. D.E.I says, hire to reflect diversity, Equity (which means first identify an under privileged group and then make a show of hiring that representative identity group) and Inclusion. Merit based hiring said, in principle at least, that you will hire the best man or woman or person for the job, without bias, and based on a skill assessment process. What does without bias mean? Simply stated it is generally understood, you will fairly advertise a job. From among the applicants short-listed you will have a fair due process to make further selection, of who qualifies for the job description. If a male and a female both are short-listed , you will make the best offer to the best candidate based on qualification over gender, because Gender bias was detected. That is how feminism came to disrupt in the workplace because they could demonstrate bias with data.

The argument against Merit was, that Merit is somehow subjective, not objective and fair. That people who seemed to do well in merit based competencies and competitions, were able to do so only because they were privileged and given more preference and access, for example as a White Male, you had more chances to land a job over a woman or man of another race. And because there was clear truth in this broadly speaking, white women most enthusiastically jumped onto white male bashing. The fun had only begun. Suddenly one day down the line, at the workplace now white females had become the overly privileged class. In come Black Men. Wait Men?!! Black? Ok also more Black Women. What only Black people? Ok Asian Males and Females? Which type of Asian? Fair skinned or brown skinned? Which religion now? Ok so now we already have a melting pot of Genders and races. Hmm, how else can we stir it next? How about a new Gender type? Trans! Wait, how many Black Trans? How many Asian Trans? it never ends. There is always a new version of an identity not included previously because someone else wants a cut in the pie. It's tribal warfare!

What was wrong with Merit? Well for starters who decides merit? What is merit? We all know when someone has merit but no one has a specific formula to define it and ensure Merit always wins, because definition of merit is also hard to pin down. Merit got a bad rap because hiring started happening in a biased manner. Somewhat like cherry picking and gerrymandering. There was a evidently recognizable bias quotient. The persons appointed to select by merit displayed their own biases in selection. Let's be objective and fair. DEI was welcomed by many initially because we all saw hiring biases. But while the initial discussion started with correcting issues, why has DEI become an issue in itself now?

• The issue with D.E.I

DEI the acronym, stands for Diversity, Equity & Inclusion. Every knows what it means and supposed to achieve and everyone can read on it if they want to, but what is the issue?

The issue as I see it is with Equity (My opinion). No one argues diversity is good. No one argues inclusion is good. But this Equity is divisive and as I see it has only caused aggravations and helped no one. Why you may ask. In my opinion and understanding, but it also reflects a wider consensus; the core question is Who decides who has more equity? In USA now Equity seems to be a tribal war of identity politics. Your character, your skills, don't matter now. Things we all can acquire and cultivate regardless of our race, gender, religion and politics DO NOT MATTER ANYMORE! What matters in this Equity tribal warfare politics, is things you were born with. *Or not as in case of Trans & Woke identities, which at times seems like a circus comedy episode that is not ending, and too big a topic to take on here.

How is DEI not racialism in practice? In practice DEI caters to a perceived tokenism of hiring for optics. A reverse discrimination against perceived historical oppressors. In fact the ugliest and most illogical part of CRT (Critical Race Theory) and DEI are actually, enshrining into Policy and Law discriminatory actions against a group of people, whose ancestors (as per the version of history one chooses to believe) did alleged injustices, so their offspring ought to now pay for perpetuity! It sounds preposterous, but a whole crop of people came up to be apologists for their ancestors, enthusiastically suffering from a fever of Martyrdom complex and virtue signaling! There was a whole lot of academia level brainwashing, where school and college kids, aided by bad bad professors, got indoctrinated into the narrative that all white people are the oppressive class and all black, brown, Asian people are the oppressed class! There is always a oppressor and oppressed class. I was a school kid when the O.J. Simpson case unfolded across Global TV Screens. While everyone knew he committed the murders, the all black Jury Trial, acquitted him because the whole argument tilted towards Race. Even in a case of brutal murder. The subsequent civil trial held him guilty of the murders. O J Simpson case highlighted, that most people when stirred, don't vote on merit or facts but on emotional biases. There were some black voices who found the Jury verdict of O J Simpson unfair, but the larger percentage of people felt it was right O J Simpson walked a free man because a black man cannot be held guilty for a white man or woman's murder because of historical, civilizational wrongs! This is why Race based decision making is always wrong.

• What INSTEAD of DEI?

There is a famous saying; Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. In this case Merit is the Baby. We all welcome a fair, diverse and inclusive world and workplace. But we all need caliber and merit.

I propose D.M.I or Diversity, Merit and Inclusion. Merit and competency must be non negotiables. No preferential stakes to anyone. No Equality of outcomes. Outcome must flow from the effort or action taken. Two wrongs do not make a right. And Corporates must stop trying to instruct people how to be some common WOKE culture group. WOKEness is utterly divisive, with its often insane levels of political correctness where speech is weaponized and playing victim has become a social currency. You cannot be allowed to create a new privileged historically victim class of people. Corporates must strictly stay away from fostering identity politics. Corporates must not get involved in cancel culture, trying to bully people who do not conform to some dominant political idea of race, gender and politics. Wokeness in practice has become fascist and intolerant of any diversity of opinion. Wokeness has started the dangerous and unstable trend of Emotional Drama and noise over riding sense and logic and even Science!!! It's terrifying to be forced to live in a world where facts & logic can be discarded for someone's feelings. And the feelings of the shrillest and most aggressively organized group dominates.

Let's say you have an accident. You are rushed to a hospital. It is an emergency. Do you ask WOKE questions like, what is the skin color of the doctor? what is their preferred pronoun? What is their gender and which political ideology they belong to? So you get an incompetent doctor who ticks all the DEI identity boxes just as you like it. You confident you will receive the right medical care? NO!

Because the ability to do the required job, in the right manner has NOTHING TO DO with anybody's skin color, race, religion or even Gender in most jobs. But it has EVERYTHING to do with your skill, competency, ethics and character! And no DEI framework caters to these higher and better qualities.

In Conclusion, because one can keep going on, I can see that DEI is headed for trouble and will meet its logical end because it is unsustainable and simply aims to create one injustice to replace another, or give more privilege to Paul now, because Peter has had his turn! Any organization, group or society can only grow when the value it creates can be increased, improved and scaled. DEI is only about including someone by excluding someone else!

No Process can survive lack of quality. And DEI hiring promises everything except fairness, quality and merit. I seem to be in glorious company in holding this opinion. The famous genius Elon Musk recently tweeted something on DEI millions across the world resonated with.

"DEI must DIE. The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination." Elon Musk

Elon Musk on DEI

P.s. - Originally posted on my linkedin page on Aug 17, 2024. I am so happy at what I wrote, because I still feel the same. I can always wish to write better and with brevity, but I would still not change a word here.