(2025-02-10) Majors Corporate Dei Is An Imperfect Vehicle For Deeply Meaningful Ideals

Charity Majors: Corporate “DEI” is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals. I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate DEI efforts have always struck me as ineffective and bland; bolted on at best, if not actively compensating for evil behavior.

Recent events (the tech backlash, the govt purge) have forced me to sit down and seriously rethink my operating philosophy. It’s one thing to be cranky and take potshots at corporate DEI efforts when they seem ascendant and powerful; it’s another when they are being stamped out and reviled in the public mind.

It took all of about thirty seconds to spot my first mistake, which is that no, actually, my work does not and cannot speak for itself. No one’s does, really, but especially not when your job literally consists of setting direction and communicating priorities.

If you don’t state what you care about, how are random employees supposed to guess whether the things they value about your culture are the result of hard work and careful planning, or simply…emergent properties? Even more importantly, how are they supposed to know if your failures and shortcomings are due to trying but failing or simply not giving a shit?

The problem isn’t the fact that companies talk about their values, it’s that they treat it like a branding exercise instead of an accountability mechanism.

Fallacy #1: “DEI is the opposite of excellence or high performance”

You can kind of see where they’re coming from, but only by conveniently forgetting that every team and every company is a system.

Fallacy #2: “DEI is the definition of excellence or high performance”

There is a mirror image error on the other end of the spectrum, though. You sometimes hear DEI advocates talk as though if you juuuust build the most diverse teams and the most inclusive culture, you will magically build better products.

There is no such thing as the “best” or “right” values. Values are a way of navigating territory and creating alignment where there IS no one right answer. People value what they value, and that is their right.

DEI gets caricatured in the media as though the goal of DEI is diverse teams and equitable outcomes. But DEI is better seen as a toolkit. Your company values ought to help you achieve your goals, and your goals as a business usually some texture and nuance beyond just profit. At Honeycomb, for example, we talk about how we can “build a company people are proud to be part of”. DEI can help with this.

I am by no means trying to muster a blanket defense of everything that gets lumped under DEI, just to be clear. Some of it is performative, ham-handed, well-intentioned but ineffective, disconnected or a distraction from real problems; diversity theater; a steam valve to vent off any real pressure for change; nitpicky and authoritarian, flirts with thought policing, or just horrendously cringe.

I don’t know how much I really care whether corporate DEI programs live or die, because I never thought they were that effective to start with

It’s a symbolic loss of something that was only ever a symbolic gain. Corporate DEI programs as we know them sprung up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but I haven’t exactly noticed the world getting substantially more diverse or inclusive since then.

Which is not to say that tech culture has not gotten more diverse or inclusive over the longer arc of my career; it absolutely, definitely has. I began working in tech when I was just a teenager, over 20 years ago, and it is actually hard to convey just how much the world has changed since then.
And not because of corporate DEI policies. So why? Great question.

I think social media explains a lot about why awareness suddenly exploded in the 2010s.

The 2010s were a ferment of commentary and consciousness-raising in tech

People were comparing notes with each other and realizing how common some of these experiences were,

If you were in tech and you were paying attention at all, it got harder and harder to turn a blind eye. People got educated despite themselves, and in the end…many, many hearts and minds were changed.

I know so many people whose hearts and minds were changed, who then took action.
They worked to diversify their personal networks of friends and acquaintances; to mentor, sponsor, and champion underrepresented folks in their workplaces; to recruit, promote, and refer women and people of color; to invite marginalized folks to speak at their conferences and on their panels; to support codes of conduct and unconscious bias training; and to educate themselves on how to be better allies in general.
All of this was happening for at least a decade leading up to 2020

Kang, again:
What happened in many workplaces across the country after 2020 was that the people in charge were either genuinely moved by the George Floyd protests or they were scared. Both the inspired and the terrified built out a D.E.I. infrastructure in their workplaces

It’s easier to make rules and enforce them than it is to change hearts and minds I think this happened to a lot of DEI advocates in the 2020-2024 era, when corporations briefly invested DEI programs and leaders with some amount of real corporate power, or at least the power to make petty rules. And I do not think it served our ideals well.

There are ways that the DEI movement really lost me around the time they got access to formal levers of power. It felt like there was a shift away from vulnerability and persuasion and towards mandates and speech policing.

Instead of taking the time to explain why something mattered, people were simply ordered to conform to an ever-evolving, opaque set of speech patterns as defined by social media

Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be

There is a real hunger out there on the part of employees to work at a company that does more than the bare minimum in the realm of ethics

And increasingly, one of the main places people go to look for evidence that your company has ethical standards and takes them seriously is…the diversity of your teams.

*It’s a reality that when you’re a startup, your resources are scarce, your time horizons are short. You have to make smart decisions about where to invest them. Perfection is the enemy of success. Make good choices, so you can live to fight another day.

But fight another day.*

Finally let me say this: if you don’t give a shit about diversity or inclusion, don’t pretend you give a shit. It isn’t going to fool anyone. (If you “really care” but for some reason DEI loses every single bake-off for resources, friend, you don’t care.)

When I look at the long list of companies who say they are rolling back mentions to DEI internally, I don’t get that depressed. I see a long list of companies who never really meant it anyway. I’m glad they decided to stop performing.