Are DEI jobs really disappearing?, asked a recent article in Pivot magazine.

Here’s some of what the article, written by Tayo Bero, had to say:

• After the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing protests in 2020, executives in the corporate world responded by pumping resources into their diversity, equity and inclusion departments. Three years later, many of those roles have disappeared.
• According to recent analysis from Live Data Technologies, chief diversity officers are more vulnerable to layoffs than other types of jobs. And, according to Revelio Labs, it’s not just execs. More than 300 DEI roles have been eliminated in the last six months, including at Amazon, Twitter and Nike, which have lost between five and 16 DEI professionals each.
• The problem, according to (Kristen Liesch, co-founder and co-CEO at Tidal Equality), is that back in 2020, company executives poured a lot of money into what essentially amounted to good-looking window dressing….
• On top of that, Liesch explains, it’s been three years since the initial 2020 uprisings, and the pendulum swing in that time has been strong and swift.
• “In the U.S. [specifically], we’ve seen the backlash take a very particular legislative and political framing [with] the striking down of affirmative action laws.”
• …Economic constraints are also a major factor in how organizations choose to invest in inclusion and equity strategies. With a recession looming, company executives are scrutinizing their DEI portfolios to see if they’ve delivered any economic returns to the business. And in most cases, executives claimed they simply couldn’t make the business case for these increased DEI efforts.

The article argues for a different approach to the area, for example:

• So far, DEI efforts have pinned the onus for change squarely on individuals, reflected in initiatives like unconscious-bias training. This is not an effective way of addressing the root cause of these inequities, Liesch says. “All of our systems, unless they were designed from the starting point with equity as an explicit desirable outcome, are biased in creating discriminatory and inequitable outcomes,” she says. “So, the first thing that needs to happen is a conceptual shift away from the individual’s responsibility to be the source of the change to the systems-based approach.”
• One very simple example, Liesch says, is blind hiring, where HR departments strip applicants’ resumés and cover letters of any identifying details, which can reveal everything from race, age, educational background to class, and evaluate based on different criteria. This changes what information a hiring manager has access to, which can help avoid triggering their implicit biases.

But not all hiring lends itself to the committed “blindness” that might be applied, say, to auditioning cello players, a screen separating applicants and decision-makers; it’s an example of how Bero’s article is of great interest, while also seeming somewhat abstract and removed. A recent commentary in Canadian Accountant by Zvi Singer, titled Ethnic diversity is still a serious issue at the top level in accounting firms, more directly laid out some of the stakes:

• A 2019 survey from the Association of International Certified Professional Accountants found that only nine per cent of accounting firm partners identify as non-white.
• Another study from the Association of Accountants and Financial Professionals in Business found that only 8.9 per cent of accountants and auditors identified as Hispanic or Latino, 8.5 per cent identified as Black or African American and 12 per cent identified as Asian. In total, these group represent almost 30 per cent of professional accountants, but their proportion in partner levels are much lower than that…
• Our study also found that ethnic minority partners were more likely to be in charge of audit engagements if a client’s senior leadership also included ethnic minorities.
• It also showed that, once an error occurred, white audit partners were more likely to be absolved of audit failures than ethnic minority audit partners. The likelihood of an audit partner being replaced after a material error was discovered in a financial statement was higher for ethnic minority partners (39 per cent) versus white partners (24 per cent).

More than most, DEI (an acronym I dislike, but never mind…) seems to reveal the limits of the clapped-out cliché that “what gets measured gets managed”: if one is so inclined, it’s easy enough to concoct figures that demonstrate movement toward greater representation and inclusivity and all the rest of it, but such a numbers game may be substantially disconnected from (or even opposed to) true equality of perception and opportunity and outcome. And yet, to not measure at all would often only be an invitation to apathy and denial. This leaves the area looking rather precarious: to seemingly pull back on DEI may resemble a surrender, but to do otherwise may invite wild attack (for example, the weird but widespread notion that Boeing’s recent problems were largely caused by excessive focus on DEI) while achieving far less than hoped. Bero’s article points to some ways of navigating these poles: Interac for example doesn’t have a chief diversity officer, but instead takes “more holistic’ steps involving various internal programs, and a strategy of “embedding DEI by design in [its] business,” including programs for newcomers to Canada, summer internships and experiential learning programs for Black and Indigenous youth, and acting as a corporate sponsor for equity-based programs (of course, there may be a hopefully productive tension between such targeted recognition efforts and the “blind hiring” philosophy). I certainly don’t have any great new insight into the area, but just as I recently argued that Trump stands in inherent opposition to what we might call the “spirit” of IFRS, I do believe that our higher aspirations for true equality and equity are deeply aligned with it…

The opinions expressed are solely those of the author.