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Last week, my company released its 3rd annual DEI report. It consists of a laundry list of DEI achievements, some questionable statistics, and inspiring messages from very well-paid executives.
Performance reviews are another feature of this time of year. Conventional wisdom holds that getting a good review depends on meeting your pseudo-self-defined goals for the year—and, by implication, on setting achievable ones. With that in mind, our executives set measurable, sensible goals with every expectation of meeting them.
That was a joke. The goals were 1/2 women and 1/3 people of color. We were reasonably close on the latter, not that this required any particular change. But our goal for gender parity was hilariously out of line with the ~1/4 we currently have. I could propose various reasons why an engineering- and manufacturing-heavy corporation that makes devices for killing people might not employ so many women, but that’s not really the point. No, this is not a serious goal. It’s advertising.
My company is not particularly woke. It repeats some of the phrases and buys into the aesthetic, but it’s clearly not ideologically captured. If there are true believers, they sure aren’t in charge. DEI is valued insofar as it keeps us from alienating potential talent and potential customers—and no more. At the end of the day it’s not going to shoot itself in the foot in service of equality or equity.
I believe this is true of the vast majority of corporations in the US! Identity politics are a small part of the business signaling that goes on every day. It’s directly proportional to how much the product is a cultural symbol rather than a material good. Apple products or Amazon media or Super Bowl ads are more likely to publicly proclaim their diversity because they’re selling an idea. It does not require true believers, though they help with credibility. The idea itself is what benefits from woke signaling.
This has implications for the trajectory of DEI. Debating whether woke ads are going to increase or alienate support is missing the point. That sort of identity politics is downstream of the culture war, and should not be used to make predictions about “peak woke.” It represents corporate ability to score points off the prevailing winds, not ideologues’ level of infiltration into corporations.
Defense contractors are wildly biased towards veterans. Our hiring is more likely to involve some sort of aggressive patriotism; their scruples are more likely to support selling drones and bombs. Sometimes this even has an advantage of rapport with customers. But this is an end, not a means. It would be a mistake to predict growing evangelism for veterans due to our obvious ideological capture. Likewise, reading DEI reports as a foothold in the culture wars is missing the point. They are a specific form of advertising, and follow the popularity of idpol rather than driving it.
More likely, oligarch financial institution demands ESG ratings. These ratings are then handed down the chain of command until they land on some middle manager at a welding company in a very white town and have to be rammed through. It used to be that companies had owners, today the owner is a vast network of middle managers representing dozens of funds who may very well be investing in each other, forming a large circle. Nobody is really in charge, the decisions are made far from the people who implement them and the owners barely are aware of what is going on. Companies that want to increase their rating can hire a diversity manager to fix their score. The score is calculated on an Excel spreadsheet which will in turn be used to calculate another score on another excel spread sheet so that someone on lower Manhattan can write a nice report advertising their financial instruments.
I don’t think this is representative of sufficiently large public companies, but I’m not very confident about it.
My point was that corporate DEI, at least in engineering, is about aesthetics rather than enacting any actual policy. That’s compatible with governance-by-spreadsheet in which no one really cares about the ends, just the score on currently valued metrics. It’s not really what I’d expect from oligarchs pushing an agenda. Or perhaps I’m misunderstanding your point about the financial institutions?
Ultimately, actual racial breakdown of employees will matter, and promises won't suffice. Management won't care if engineers feel that their Black female coworker isn't pulling her weight, if she contribues sufficently to the company ESG score.
Products may be worse than if merit was the sole metric in hiring, but this is dealing with the classic problem of seen vs unseen.
This is exactly what I’m not seeing. The report was not setting goals for strategic change, it was setting goals because they sounded representative, then listing all the neat pats on the back we got for other stuff. I see that as the marketing version of DEI.
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Fortune 500 companies are, for all intents and purposes, the epicenter of power in the modern US. The claim that they will be required to make meaningful changes borders on the absurd. Instead they’ll redefine ‘underrepresented’ and ‘minority’ and hire women janitors and secretaries who will be attached to the engineering department.
Awesome, we'll take it seriously and the sales department area will soon look like a pigsty. (We'll let them use our secretaries so we don't go under due to their inability to spell).
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