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Fashionably late, I would say.
I'm only relying on the example of "DEI" provided in your original comment. Unless DEI encapsulates "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes" (in a discriminatory way I might add), why would you include "Women-owned businesses" as an example of a DEI initiative? Is there a law mandating that women-owned businesses must be X% of businesses? AFAIK most of the benefits that women-owned businesses receive involve preferential access to funding and grants and so on, but they don't amount to an explicit mandate that women-owned businesses must be 50% of the businesses in a given field.
Unless that actually exists and the situation is even more ridiculous than I initially thought (I seriously hope this is not the case but won’t rule it out), or unless your opinion is that it must be in the legislation to qualify as DEI, which seems overly pedantic as to how the incentive should be implemented, I find the statement you've made here to be in conflict with your previous ones.
I would think they are both DEI due to their shared objective of achieving representation for "marginalised groups" and that most people would consider them such. DEI isn't defined by a hyperspecific set of actions so much as it is by a loose set of beliefs and objectives IMO.
This reasoning is quite odd, to say the least. The concept of social programs is an old one, however that doesn't mean that the word "DEI" can't be used to refer to a set of (largely discriminatory) social programs that attempt to bring about social change through funding based on a specific ideological outlook, within a certain cultural context. Just because something can be defined as part of a broader phenomenon does not mean it can't also be specifically singled out for its peculiarities.
And even if DEI-like things existed before the term was coined, I don't necessarily think a term being retroactively applicable inherently makes it invalid. If that was so, a large swath of terms used within scholarship to define systems of social organisation that have been around since forever would need to be thrown out.
Yes / no. In the YIMBY / NIMBY realm that I'm active in, a housing project will only receive funding (tax breaks, grants, etc.) if it can prove that a certain number of its contractors are women-owned businesses. So while it's not a law per se, it's the direct result of legislative action. You will miss out on business if you're not female-owned, which leads to the cliche loophole of wife-owns-husband's business.
My point is that this^ type of legislative action is different than creating scholarships for women that help them get the credentials that are seen as barriers for entry into leadership positions. Ends vs. means. Grouping all of it together as DEI is too broad of a brushstroke for me to not argue against it.
This is a classic example of "spending money to incentivise a change in outcomes". It's not legally enforcing that a certain number of a housing project's contractors must be women-owned businesses, it's just providing additional funding to those who employ a certain proportion of women-owned businesses. In much the same way that initiatives like providing women with supports, extra networking opportunities (see page 44 here) or extra education + credentials indirectly results in the hiring of women into certain occupations by favouring one half of the population in such a way that they will be more noticeable by or desirable to employers, this policy structures things in a way which indirectly gets people to select women-owned businesses, thus changing outcomes via changing incentives. I don't agree with the idea that the examples provided in my post are materially different from the one you've provided as an example of DEI. You could possibly draw another (IMO even more arbitrary and fine-grained) distinction between the two which doesn't rely on the distinction between "mandating an outcome" vs just "incentivising it via funding", but that conflicts with the prior definition of DEI you've set out and suggests that you likely did not have a clear understanding of the supposed distinction in the first place.
I will also note that in one of the budget statements I referred to, "employers, training providers, schools and community organisations" were being provided grants to "facilitate career opportunities and pathways for women, particularly in non-traditional industries and occupations" (page 40 here). Employers being provided grants to create career opportunities for women is pretty on-the-nose, and I'm not sure how any of that particularly differs from the "women-owned businesses" example you provided.
In addition, I disagree with how you've generally approached defining terms throughout the span of this conversation - your definition of DEI is overly centred around extreme levels of hair-splitting about means in spite of any shared ends, and I think your "retroactivity" argument fails as a defence of it (nor is calling it a "broadbrush" particularly convincing to me). For my part I can't help but argue against the repeated insistence that one should adopt terminology which "acknowledges" three million fine-grained gradations of difference while depriving people of large-scale concepts; it’s almost as if you want people never to refer to broad concepts like "blue" because there are differences between powder blue and ultramarine - but that won’t change how people feel about movements and initiatives that are clearly closely and intimately related. The very idea of categorisation exists so people can collectively refer to meaningfully related phenomena, and you can have different levels of categorisation which are more high or low-level. As such, I steadfastly reject the accusation of broadbrushing, and maintain that the usage of the term "DEI" to encapsulate all of the described initiatives is more or less appropriate.
EDIT: added more
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