By Sarah Rutherford
Twenty years ago when I told people that I ‘worked in diversity’ I was often met with blank faces. Explaining that it was the new word for equal opportunities and that I worked with organisations to change their cultures to be more female-friendly usually clarified matters. Today many more people have heard about diversity but sadly not all for good reasons.
It’s good to take a step back every so often and look at our lives and work and try to place both in a wider social context. Diversity work in particular requires us to do this. What is going on in wider society and culture influences what is or isn’t going on in our organisations and certainly influences our thinking about change and our approach to it. Sometimes acknowledging these wider influences is useful less we think that the current approach and language represent an objective truth untainted by business interests and wider social and political thought. Some questioning is definitely required now.
Coming in for Criticism
There have been many times over the past twenty five years where there has been ‘diversity fatigue’, the numbers stagnate, everyone gets a bit fed up and there is a bit of a rethink. In the UK, more than in Europe, we import US ideas when it comes to this topic despite having completely different histories of oppression and discrimination. A shift in language may reflect a shift in approach, a gear change. We have seen a change from equal opportunities/equality to diversity (considered more business friendly and less legalistic) and inclusion (culture focused). In recent years equity has replaced equality, with surprising little debate. And so today it is called Diversity Equity and Inclusion.
Many DEI specialists have dismissed these criticisms as ‘right wing’ attacks. However there are a few others like myself who have a lot of experience in the sector and know something is wrong.
A lot of the criticism of DEI is coming from ‘the ‘freedom of speech’ corner writers like Douglas Murray. The Free Speech Union published a report slamming diversity initiatives as anti-business.
Many DEI specialists have dismissed these criticisms as ‘right wing’ attacks. However there are a few others like myself who have a lot of experience in the sector and know something is wrong. And we are anxious, unlike Murray et al, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. There is some really good work that produces tangible benefits to organisations which have been overshadowed by tales of compelled pronouns in emails, endless months and weeks devoted to specific groups and other performative and often alienating practices.
Earlier this year Kemi Badenoch and her team at the Equalities Office published a report called ‘Inclusion at Work’ which was critical of a lot of the sector whilst acknowledging that work on diversity and inclusion remained important but must be tied more closely to the business. This report should have been widely debated by internal and external DEI consultants and managers. Instead it was met with a stony silence or hostility.
Last month the incoming CEO Nick McClelland of a leading diversity consultancy, Byrne Dean, acknowledged that there was ‘a growing disillusionment with EDI and even somewhat of a counter movement resisting it’. He believes that the disillusionment is because of a gap between pledges and tangible outcomes and says that there ‘must be a core business strategy to work’. I and others think that there is something more than disillusionment and lack of outcomes that is creating a backlash.
But even the business case argument is being challenged, and the popularity of mass unconscious bias training has been on the wane for a while now. There have been more articles written about the failure of diversity policies…
Why US Firms Turned to Equity and Social Justice
Following the financial crash large US corporates began emphasising their commitment to ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) and a broader concept of stakeholder – in order to shift the criticism they were receiving about profit and greed. UK firms followed suit. Strong lobby groups rode this crest and public and private organisations began to sign up to a broader approach to business which encompassed care for the environment and social inequalities. This resulted in much more emphasis on social justice than had been allowed before and it is only now fifteen years on that people have begun to see ESG as a distraction from profitability and return to shareholders. Only last week Ford announced it was scaling back its DEI policies following on from a number of other US companies.
‘it is a peculiar feature of modern identity politics that the struggle for diversity is too often matched by a demand for rigid conformity.’ – Simon Fanshawe
Social justice has always been an element of equality work or diversity work. It is impossible to ignore the fact that discrimination in society seeps into organisations – they do not operate in a goldfish bowl. But organisations used to limit their diversity efforts to what was achievable and appropriate for their business. They could be ahead of the law in terms of giving better maternity leave provisions or have extensive flexible working practices but they never suggested their role was to be agents of social change per se or was in any way overtly political. Today identity politics and social justice theory including critical race theory, transgender ideology, intersectionality and the concept of privilege are no longer confined to university campuses. These ideas have seeped into organisations under the umbrella of equity.
The Influence of Equity
The change of term from equality to equity is not innocuous. Equity arguments emanate from ethics and justice, unlikely bedfellows for the corporate sector. Equity considers past (dis)advantage and intervenes to correct current disparities. However, judgements of relative advantage between individuals and groups (by virtue of their characteristics), and what kind of differential treatment may be required to address disadvantage, are complex. Who decides who is where on the hierarchy of privilege and what should be done about it? The DEI manager? There are no equity laws, only equality laws. The culture of progressive politics and the power of lobby groups has led many organisations to inadvertently enact policies out of line with the law.
Group-think and Cancellation
Simon Fanshawe OBE, one of the original founders of Stonewall and now very critical of it, discusses the impact of identity politics on the diversity and inclusion industry in his book The Power of Difference and is well aware that there has been a growing tendency in this industry to have ‘right’ answers with which everyone must agree. He claims ‘it is a peculiar feature of modern identity politics that the struggle for diversity is too often matched by a demand for rigid conformity.’
And what has happened he suggests is that ‘the nobility of those causes has sometimes given rise to mantras that mask the complexity that needs to be understood to significantly improve those responses’. We need to have difficult discussions and we can live with productive disagreement rather than agreement. We aren’t seeing these encouraged. Instead employees are told what are the right views and language to adopt, often by politically motivated lobby groups and activist employee groups. And they are punished if they do not agree either by being shamed, cancelled or sacked. No wonder DEI is getting a bad name!
It is time for a reckoning. Those in the sector must acknowledge what has gone wrong and fix it or the reputation of DEI, Diversity and Inclusion or whatever you want to call it will be damaged irreparably.
About Dr Sarah Rutherford
Q. What is your relationship with the Church?
A. I have been a practising Christian for over thirty years despite my reservations about the patriarchal history and influence over Christian teaching, which I still grapple with. The uncritical adoption of gender identity ideology via Stonewall by the Church of England over the past ten years has really angered me and I have been in correspondence with the Education Office of the General Synod for about five years – to no avail.
Q. What prompted you to write for LGB Christians
A. I heard about LGB Christians and thought – thank goodness, a group of Christians that love the Church but don’t like its stance on this issue – and made contact last year. I write a blog myself and it seemed right to contribute to LGB Christians’ blog.
Q. Tell us more about your story
A. I have a background of journalism and consultancy in gender and organisational culture and wrote a book called ‘Women’s Work Men’s Cultures – Overcoming Resistance and Changing Organisational Cultures‘ in 2011. My approach to the topic is informed by psycho-social theory and I have worked with many global organisations and professional services firms. I fell out of love with the sector (and I suspect it fell out of love with me) when I noticed the turn to identity politics that crept in from academia together with its bedfellow, authoritarian group-think, over the past five or so years. I know I am on some organisations’ blacklist but I am lucky enough to be financially stable enough not to work so feel a responsibility to speak out.