Have you heard of DEI – it stands for Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The problem is that it’s anything but that. The argument was that it would improve profitability for businesses. It doesn’t. And now businesses are going back to focusing on…. customers. What a great idea!
Have you heard of DEI – it stands for Diversity Equity and Inclusion. The problem is that it’s anything but that.
But it is the new DEI-ty in town. That all must worship.
Diversity = Identity politics. Defined by your sexuality, gender, race, colour, disability – all called intersectionality. You’re a victim
Inclusion = We include everyone but it’s based on our definition. Language defined by the left e.g. their definition of marriage, gender, sexuality, decolonisation, environmentalism, critical theory based on certain racial groups being victims and white people being oppressors
Equity = Marxism 101. Everyone must have the same outcome irrespective of effort, talent, character
What DEI actually is
Deception = confusion around gender, sexuality, and disunity – racial conflict
Inequality = Special ‘rights’ for special groups – the groups above
Exclusion = Cancel culture if your views don’t align with the new woke virtues
The expectation is that every business, every charity, every organisation should adopt this philosophy. Especially after BLM arose from the death of George Floyd in 2020 – which we’ll come back to.
But the DEI narrative seems to be slowly……DIE-ing. Let’s look at some examples.
Agricultural-equipment manufacturer John Deere released a statement distancing itself from DEI and affirming that it will no longer support “external social or cultural awareness” events, despite previously describing DEI as one of its “highest-priority topics.”
John Deere’s “Global Policy Against Discrimination and Harassment” includes examples of harassment prohibited by the company include 1) “comments or ‘jokes’, kidding, or teasing based on a person’s sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression,” 2) “sex-related or gender-related language or offensive comments that reflect sex or gender stereotypes,” and 3) “any other offensive or unwelcome conduct based on sex, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.”
You’ll note there’s no rules around teasing or kidding or language or unwelcome conduct related to Race? Disability? physical features? Stutter?
In a 2022 annual report, John Deere listed “Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion” as one of its “highest-priority topics” and its “priorities” include “embedding Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) principles into all aspects of how we run.” The company’s board of directors is 36 percent female and nearly 20 percent African American.
…“DEI is the only global behavioral performance metric upon which all salaried employees are evaluated.” [The company was committed to] “grow relationships” with “disadvantaged business enterprises,” such as those “owned by veterans, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and individuals with disabilities.”
In a statement released, the manufacturer said it prioritizes “internal policies that more closely align our business strategy to meet the needs of our customers.”
How refreshing!
To that end, the company announced a series of commitments
Have a watch at the concerns of the DEI specialists
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kNL2Z4GyvA
So they’re going to focus on ALL customers and ALL farmers – rather than virtue signal on just a specific group as per the DEI model. Sounds excellent.
And John Deere isn’t the first farm-related company to cut back on DEI. In late June, Tractor Supply announced it would no longer submit data to the leftist Human Rights Campaign or adhere to DEI goals.
Zoom laid off a DEI team earlier this year, saying it would instead work with external consultants moving forward, according to business website Bloomberg. Google and Meta (Facebook) also made cuts to DEI following their 2020 pledges.
CNBC reported that between 2020 and 2021, DEI job postings increased by nearly 30%. Last year, DEI-related job postings declined 44% in mid-2023 from the year before at the same time. \
And in this article
Microsoft had been one of the many companies that pledged to spend millions of dollars to hire more people of colour. In June 2020, the Microsoft CEO sent an email to employees saying the company had “committed to take action to help address racial injustice and inequity, and unequivocally believe that Black lives matter.”
[But the recent] email reportedly said the DEI team was eliminated due to “changing business needs” as of July 1.
“True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020,” said the email
Even left wing woke CNN admits it’s happening. In this article it says:
High-profile incidents, such as Disney’s clash with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the “Don’t Say Gay” bill and Bud Light’s partnership with transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney, kicked off a right-wing backlash.
The resulting controversies highlighted the fragility of corporate activism in the face of conservative opposition. Economic pressures, including higher interest rates and reduced consumer spending, compounded the issue. Companies reverted to prioritising profits over social change, retreating from their activist positions… To quote CNN contributor and rockstar journalist Kara Swisher: “As it turned out, it was capitalism after all.”
Budlight used to be the #1 beer. It’s fallen to #3 and lost more than a billion dollars over their virtue signalling and wokeness.
US commentator Dr Michael Brown who we’ve interviewed before says in his article in The Christian Post
Last year, things got so extreme with Target’s “tuck” bathing suits for males who identified as females (including children)… As CNN reported in May, “Target is limiting the number of stores that will sell LGBTQ-themed merchandise for Pride Month in June following a boycott from right-wing activists last year that took a toll on the brand’s bottom line.”
CBS recently reported that, “this year, public-facing Pride campaigns at some of the world’s largest brands were quieter than usual. At other companies that previously had them, they were completely absent. Fewer public campaigns mean less visibility, which LGBTQ advocates and consumers in the community say can be dangerous in myriad ways.”
The Wall Street Journal recently published an article about how the consulting firm McKinsey announced in 2015 that it had “found a link between profits and executive racial and gender diversity.” Being woke to DEI.
This research was “used by investors, lobbyists, and regulators to push for more women and minority groups on boards, and to justify investing in companies that appointed them.”
Within five years, there was a massive shift in how many companies hired and conducted their business. In 2020, the DEI ethos metastasized. Companies not only embraced the “racial reckoning,” they began to implement full-scale—and almost certainly illegal—racial quotas.
The study gave corporations air cover to promote ideologically motivated diversity programs while saying that it was simply “good for business.” It wasn’t.
It just made the companies woke!
And the truth soon came out. In this article it says
According to The Wall Street Journal, “academics have tried to repeat McKinsey’s findings and failed, concluding that there is in fact no link between profitability and executive diversity.”
The only thing that the study found was that profitable companies ended up with more diversity—after they had succeeded, not before. That makes sense in a lot of ways. Big companies that are highly profitable could more easily afford to simply promote DEI with fewer consequences. A company that’s scrambling to launch itself doesn’t have that luxury.
The authors of the McKinsey study say they’ve found a way to prove correlation between DEI programs and profitability, but even that is in doubt. The Wall Street Journal noted that McKinsey won’t release the names of the companies it used for the study, and it was unable to show benefits from diversity on a large range of metrics.
There was just no link at all between diversity and corporate success.
…Not only did many companies adopt the research as true, but the most powerful financial and governmental institutions with vast powers over the market picked it up and used it to foist DEI on corporate America.
From the Journal:
McKinsey’s research figures first in BlackRock’s references for supporting a board diversity target of 30% in its proxy voting guidelines…
It has been cited by dozens of campaign groups pushing for rules to support consideration of social issues by pension funds and others, too.
BlackRock, according to the Journal, cited the study as evidence that diversity created financial benefits… BlackRock has gotten into hot water over its corporate practices and has announced that it is stepping away from environmental, social, and governance investing.
… Paradoxically, the DEI industry is about creating a conformity of worldviews where every institution, every CEO, every employee is roped into the same left-wing beliefs and swims in the same direction. Those who dissent are punished and ostracized.
There is now a growing counter movement to prevent this full-scale transformation. And it’s getting harder for businesses to justify their ideological commitments when they are bleeding money.
That is all true isn’t it. Try going into a DEI meeting and reading the bible verses on marriage, or on being created male and female! Or that we are one in the sight of the Lord.
You know things are getting interesting when tennis great Martina Navratilova, herself an out and proud lesbian, could say, “I know I’m on the right side of history” in calling so-called transwomen athletes “cheats.”
And this is part of the issue. It started out as gays and lesbians.
But then under critical theory, and intersectional theory of victim groups, you had to start including other so-called victim groups – oppressed groups – so that mean a broader agenda of anti racism, anti sexism, anti-transphobia, decolonisation, asexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals – and you had to support tearing down prisons and borders and defunding the police and denouncing cis white males.
It became quite exhausting – and comical.
Just watch the Te Pati Maori or the Green party to see how extreme it can get.
The pride flag of the original distorted six colours of the rainbow – not the traditional 7 – now has pink and blue for trans, and black and brown for racial justice, and non-binary, and people of colour in the LGBT movement, and the purple circle for intersex.
Now we’ve seen some hints of this decline in “pride” and DEI even in New Zealand.
For example, there was an almost 20% drop in the number of schools doing Pride Week in Schools – down to just 250 schools – 10% of all schools. Yes – a drop despite strong media and even Ministry of Education marketing and cajouling. Schools want to get on with educating, not indoctrinating.
And we’ve noticed that companies have gone a little quieter around LGBT’s pink shirt day, and pride month of February here in NZ.
You can see some of the DEI policies for companies on our website WokeUp.nz. As our website says:
DEI …is fixated on differences in race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Devotees claim that DEI will enhance organisations, by making them more diverse. DEI undermines meritocracy as it encourages the hiring and promotion of employees based on their race, sex, or other “acceptable” characteristics, rather than on their skill, competence and work ethic…DEI drives a 40:40:20 ratio at senior levels of employment. 40:40:20 refers to 40% men, 40% women, 20% other genders.
Here’s an excellent story from FOX News
Alexandr Wang, who founded Scale AI in 2016, shared on social media that his company has formalized an MEI hiring policy. That is, “merit, excellence and intelligence,” in apparent contrast to DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion policies popular at other companies. “Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one,” Wang wrote in an X post on Thursday. “Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale.”… The six-year-old startup, is currently worth $14 billion
This is Wang – just 27 years old.
Wang said he’s received several questions about talent at Scale AI. “Talent is our #1 input metric. It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence,” he wrote. “That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart.” The CEO emphasized that Scale AI treats candidates as individuals, not representatives of groups. “We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. “We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character
“There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree,” Wang wrote. “No group has a monopoly on excellence. .. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal.”… Wang’s X post won praise from several Silicon Valley business leaders.
How refreshing. There is hope.
Now just before I finish, there was a feature story in the NZ Herald just over the weekend – backing up exactly what I’m saying.
Woke culture: Why millennials and Gen Zers are facing a backlash from the left
Victoria [a mother, is] a feminist Green Party supporter with socialist, centre-left views…
The mother of two idealistic Gen Z daughters, Victoria is an entrepreneur who has built her company culture on diversity, equity and inclusion.
That’s exactly the kind of wokeism pilloried by many of those with ideological views that lean harder right. But Victoria isn’t the only one of her liberal friends who thinks the pendulum has swung too far, making young people overly sensitive to other points of view and out of touch with reality.
Originally signifying an awareness of important issues, especially related to racial and social justice, describing someone as “woke” has been co-opted in certain circles as a term of both ridicule and abuse.
At the last election, Act leader David Seymour campaigned on ending “Labour’s reign of woke terror” and made headlines again in May for calling out sushi as a woke food that’s inappropriate content for a government-subsidised school lunchbox.
WokeUp NZ, a website launched last month by lobby group Family First, uses a scale of woke ratings (non-woke, woke lite and extreme woke) in its stated mission to “expose the NZ businesses promoting woke leftist ideologies”.
A profile on each company lists its official policies and public commentary related to issues such as abortion, critical race theory, gender ideology/LGBTQ, climate change and a commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Like most of the white, middle-class parents in her social circle, Victoria has little in common with either Act voters or the conservative Christian base of Family First. But even she finds herself struggling with uber-woke Gen Zers and millennials who feel “triggered” by the use of certain words or when someone merely disagrees with them.
What annoys her most is the shallowness of ”virtue signalling” on social media, where it’s important to be seen aligning with the right causes, from mental health and the trans community to Black Lives Matter and the war in Gaza.
It’s a fascinating read – and probably why those on the left definitely didn’t like our WokeUp website.
But the tide is turning – not only on the transgender issue, and chemicalising and confusing our children around gender.
DEI totally deserves to die. Hopefully New Zealand companies are listening.
