In recent months, the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have been unrelenting. Since Donald Trumps win in November, several major companies including McDonalds, Target, Amazon, and Meta have announced that theyre either scaling back or outright ending their DEI programs. And since Trump returned to the White House, his administration has been dismantling all DEI programs across the federal government. The assault has been so aggressive that at one point the Trump administration seemed to just be scrapping all references to the words diversity, equity, and inclusion on government websites and handbooks, even in cases where they dont actually refer to DEI programming. According to the Wall Street Journal, that included deleting references like the inclusion of identification numbers on tax forms. But despite the efforts of Republicans to turn DEI into a battlefront for the culture wars, DEI practices are nothing new. In fact, they trace their roots to the civil rights movement and have long been a part of corporate America, let alone organizations in the public sector. Their goal is to build fairer workplaces by focusing on things like diversity in hiring or reducing discrimination creating opportunities that otherwise might not exist for qualified people from marginalized backgrounds. The backlash against DEI has had measurable consequences. In 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, and since then, enrollment of Black and Latino students at universities has declined. Republicans have also started using the phrase DEI as a slur.Understanding the history of DEI how it came to be, as well as its strengths and weaknesses can help us figure out how we got to this point, and, for organizations that are actually still interested in promoting diversity and fairness in the workplace, where we can go from here. The origins of DEIWhile diversity programs have faced some push and pull, until recently, they were largely cemented as a mostly uncontroversial feature of the American workplace.Before they were known as DEI, these programs started as a civil rights era push toward integration. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order that required federal contractors to take active steps to ensure that they dont discriminate against applicants or employees based on race, creed, color, or national origin. This was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson which banned all companies with more than 15 employees from engaging in discrimination when it came to practices like job training, hiring, compensation, promotion, and termination. Back then, diversity programs which were called equal employment opportunity programs before the terminology evolved to diversity programs and, eventually, diversity, equity, and inclusion were mostly designed to ensure that companies complied with the law, and consisted of measures like anti-discrimination training that explained to employees what the new laws required and basic company standards.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some businesses started to go to greater lengths to avoid discrimination suits or bad press. Major companies like IBM and the Xerox Corporation adopted the stance that promoting integration and preventing discrimination was not just a matter of complying with the law but a matter of social responsibility. IBM, for example, started conducting pay equity analyses an effort to ensure that employees with similar responsibilities are paid at comparable rates in order to combat pay discrimination on the basis of race and gender in the 1970s, a practice it continues today. When President Ronald Reagan came into office, he pushed for cutting a lot of red tape. That included threatening to roll back affirmative action laws and advocating that discrimination within companies should be dealt with internally instead of being litigated in the courts. But companies and their employees had already started believing in their diversity programs, and Reagan received pushback from Democrats and Republicans, businesses and civil rights activists alike. In fact, most major companies said that they would keep their diversity programs regardless of whether they were required to.Around the same time, corporate America started settling on a new case for improving diversity in the workplace: It wasnt just the morally right thing to do, it was also good for business. The demographics of the labor force were quickly changing, and so companies developed a renewed interest in promoting diversity and inclusion in order to maintain a competitive advantage. All of this laid the foundation for the DEI programs that are being attacked today. We kind of came to this idea that diversity is going to happen, and as a result, we need to be able to manage it correctly, said Lily Zheng, a diversity and inclusion strategist and consultant. So this spawned a whole bunch of diversity training, racial sensitivity training, gender inclusion training to prepare the modern workforce for what was meant to be this huge influx of diversity.In the 2010s, the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too led to a boom in hiring diversity czars and consultants, and many organizations, from fashion brands to academic institutions, pushed PR campaigns that included diversity pledges. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, organizations showed a renewed interest in promoting diversity because of the public pressure to do the right thing. But even before the swift retreat from DEI after Trumps election win, it seemed like the so-called racial reckoning many employers promised never really materialized and now companies are trying to pretend their commitments to diversity never really happened.The shortcomings of DEI While there isnt comprehensive data across the labor force to evaluate the impact of DEI programs broadly, studies that focus on different components of diversity programs have shown mixed results. If we look at the big picture, what kinds of things have been effective at actually helping firms to hire and retain a more diverse workforce, theyre not the things that are designed to target individual bias at companies, said Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard University who has studied corporate diversity programs. Those kinds of initiatives include things like implicit bias training, which seeks to help people become aware of their own biases and figure out how to limit their negative impact, or grievance procedures, where employees can file complaints against their managers or other people in their organizations for discrimination or harassment. These programs have been very popular among companies, in part because theyre a low lift and relatively low cost. The problem is that they arent all that effective and, in some cases, might have unintended consequences. Implicit bias training, for example, tends to make participants defensive rather than open to change. Even when people want to do better, few people think that they actively make racist decisions, and so they dont necessarily think the training applies to them.These trainings and grievance procedures, theyre really designed to show people that theyre biased and change their ways either through education in the case of training or punishment in the case of grievance procedures, Dobbin said. But in practice, those processes, Dobbin says, tend to antagonize people in management, especially white men. In their typical forum, they tend to have adverse effects that are leading to decreases in the ability of firms to hire, retain, and promote Black workers, Hispanic workers, and Asian American workers, he added.This approach of seeing the problem as individual behaviors and beliefs as opposed to the structure and processes of an organization has been one of the critical failures of DEI. Thats created what some have called the DEI-industrial complex. In fact, DEI training has swelled into an $8 billion industry, allowing employers to pat themselves on the back for spending time and money on surface-level diversity programming like hiring consultants or public speakers for their employees, while not investing in an actual long-term strategy that would tangibly improve working conditions and address systemic barriers to entry that women and people of color face. Companies always want to pay for their flashy speakers, for their award ceremonies, for their external-facing communications or heritage month activities and very little is actually spent on doing things like addressing discrimination, ensuring fair pay, or creating healthy workplace processes, Zheng said. And thats a problem because these sorts of deeper investments are whats actually needed if we want to create workplaces that are more fair, that are more equitable, that are better for everyone.Whats worth keeping from DEI? When people think of DEI, they often think about diversity training or job titles like chief diversity officer. But sometimes, the best diversity and inclusion initiatives are much less flashy.In the mid-2000s, a blockbuster study showed that employers are much less likely to give applicants with Black-sounding names a callback than applicants with white-sounding names. Twenty years later, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago did a similar study, and while the results showed that companies had improved, applicants with Black-sounding names are still less likely to get an interview.The researchers found that the companies that were less likely to discriminate had something surprisingly simple in common: centralized processes and standards. Correlation, of course, is not causation, but that pattern shouldnt be dismissed. When hiring processes are not standardized, when theres no scoring rubric, when hiring managers arent trained to give consistent results and actually evaluate based on merit, you see peoples individual biases really impact the demographics of who ends up ultimately hired, Zheng said. And so the takeaway is, if you want to fight this bias, one of the simplest things you can do is very mundane: standardize your hiring process.Companies can be so focused on diversity in recruiting that they avoid making changes that would help retain employees or draw people to want to work there in the first place. Acknowledging this is part of what changed many companies approach from just thinking about diversity in hiring to making the workplace more inclusive so that people can advance their careers once their foot is in the door.Having more objective and standardized processes can reduce the risk of unfair or discriminatory compensation, disciplinary action, or termination. The persistence of pay gaps between men and women or Black and white people, for example, inherently creates a less inclusive workplace and a lasting impression on employees that they arent treated equally. Thats why long-term commitments like pay-gap reviews and corrections or accountability mechanisms like publicly releasing diversity data that would encourage workers to demand more of their employers can go a long way in promoting diversity in the workplace.DEI programs have also been criticized for not paying close enough attention to classism. In practice, DEI programs are often the corporate-friendly approach to desegregation, where the C-suites co-opt the language of social justice while doing little, if anything, to meaningfully improve the workplace for everybody. These kinds of programs are often designed to cater to a certain type of background, like college-educated workers, while ignoring class divides that continue to segregate the labor force.One DEI program that helps address this issue is changing recruiting practices, especially in companies that value graduates of elite colleges, which tend to have mostly upper-middle-class students. By expanding recruitment to all types of schools, including HBCUs, state schools, and two-year colleges, companies are likely to see more racial and class diversity in their applicant pools.So what should the future of DEI look like?With the aggressive attacks on DEI coming from the Trump administration and the kind of kowtowing weve seen from big corporations, its clear that the DEI backlash isnt going away anytime soon. Workers looking to create more inclusive workplaces will have a harder time getting their employers to adopt or expand DEI programs.Thats why companies that are actually interested in advancing equality should hone in on what really works things like standardized hiring processes, pay equity commitments, recruiting from schools outside of Ivy Leagues and the like and leave the ineffective aspects of DEI behind, including one-off trainings, speaking engagements, and half-hearted heritage month celebrations.These off-the-shelf, one shot, feel good, check-the-box kinds of initiatives are not going to be sufficient to produce any change in outcomes like giving people equal opportunity to develop, to be promoted, said Robin Ely, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School who has studied diversity programs.Companies should be data and outcome-oriented that is, they should figure out what it is, exactly, that needs to be addressed and tailor a solution to address it. Zheng also says that companies have to think about how to get buy-in from everybody. That kind of coalition building, they said, is crucial to DEIs future success. Oftentimes, the way people talk about DEI makes it sound like one racial group will get preferential treatment giving ammo to the charge Republicans often levy that companies are simply lowering standards to increase diversity, even when theyre not. Its often seen, in other words, as a zero-sum game.But Zheng suggests that the most successful DEI programs are win-wins, creating better outcomes for everybody, and advocates should focus on that communal aspect to build stronger coalitions. So before throwing out DEI initiatives altogether, companies and organizations that are actually interested in the ideals of diversity and inclusion should consider a more coalitional approach. Lets look at parental leave. Parental leave policies in the US are abysmal, theyre atrocious, and when advocates try to make them better, they often say things like, Women stand to benefit a lot from these policies, Zheng told me, adding that some advocates might argue that the patriarchy, or simply men, are the problem. Yet we lose the fact when we argue like this that men benefit enormously from parental leave as well.In the long run, this approach could indeed prove popular. The majority of Americans still think DEI programs are a good thing, though that number has been shrinking, and only a fifth of Americans think that DEI is plain bad. By designing these programs to benefit everyone, and by communicating that to workers across the board, DEI practitioners might garner more support. At the end of the day, Zheng says, we just need to design systems that are fair.See More: