LTP News Sharing:
Slide from Coca Cola DEI training, via YouTube
CNBC notes not only cuts, but also scaling back of hiring: “By mid-2023, DEI-related job postings had declined 44% from the same time a year prior…. In November 2023, the last full month for which data was available, it dropped 23% year over year.”
Critical
Race Theory’s offshoot “Diversity, Equity,
and Inclusion” captured and imprisoned
most of academia and many corporations in
the aftermath of George Floyd’s death.
It
was a frenzy to virtue signal and throw
money at …. well that was the problem.
What exactly were they trying to fix? The
DEI industrial complex, fueled by tens of
billions of dollars, had no actual
solutions. I have argued endlessly that
DEI makes things worse by focusing on
group identity rather than individual
merit, by setting groups against each
other in zero-sum games, and by
demoralizing and demeaning the very people
(loosely, ‘non-whites’) DEI purported to
help. And it is now widely recognized that
the oppressor-oppressed false narrative
pushed by many if not most DEI programming
is a leading contributor and instigator of
antisemitism.
Can
anyone point to any measurable
accomplishment of the billions of dollars
spent on DEI? And by accomplishment, I
don’t mean job-creating for a DEI
bureaucracy that adds zero economic value.
In
the education field, which is largely
divorced from DEI-conomics, it has been up
to legislators and Governors in red states
to scale back the DEI bureaucracy. In the
corporate world, the virtue signaling
appears to be meeting economic reality, and
corporations are scaling back.
As CNBC
reports, tech companies are
eliminating DEI positions at a furious
pace, with these “key points”:
- After
vocal commitments following the murder
of George Floyd in 2020, DEI programs in
the tech industry are in broad retreat. - Some
companies have laid off DEI staffers and
leaders of diverse employee resource
groups, downsized learning and
development programs, and cut budgets
for external DEI groups by as much as
90% in 2023, sources told CNBC. - The
cuts come as the tech industry doubles
down on artificial intelligence. With
fewer diverse voices represented in AI
development, the resulting products
could be less accurate or more harmful
to users.
The
article continues:
But
in 2023, some of those [DEI] programs
are in retreat.By
mid-2023, DEI-related job postings had
declined 44% from the same time a year
prior, according to data provided by job
site Indeed. In November 2023, the last
full month for which data was available,
it dropped 23% year over year.That’s
a sharp contrast with the period from
2020 to 2021, when those postings
expanded nearly 30%.In
line with this broader trend, both
Google and Meta have cut staffers and
downsized programs that fell under DEI
investment.The
year’s cuts have also impacted smaller,
third-party organizations who counted on
big tech clients for work, despite the
continued growth of those tech giants.“Whenever
there is an economic downturn in tech,
some of the first budgets that are cut
are in DEI, but I don’t think we’ve seen
such stark contrast as this year,” said
Melinda Briana Epler, founder and CEO of
Empovia, which advises companies and
leaders to use a research-based culture
of equality….Nearly
every member of Meta’s Sourcer
Development Program, more than 60
workers, was let go from the company as
part of its layoff of over 11,000
workers, CNBC learned. They claimed to
have received inferior severance
packages compared with other workers who
were laid off in the same time period.
Meta’s Sourcer Development Program was
intended to help workers from diverse
backgrounds obtain careers in corporate
technology recruiting.
also cut DEI leaders who worked with
Chief Diversity Officer Melonie Parker,
while Meta made cuts to several DEI
managers — some of whom it hired in
2020.Layoffs
at Google and Meta also included
employees who held leadership roles in
their respective Black employee resource
groups, known as ERGs….While
internal DEI programs have suffered, the
cuts were arguably even harder for
external organizations who expected the
same amount of corporate sponsorship and
support from tech companies in 2023 as
they had the prior few years.
Consistent
with the CNBC report, TechCruch declares, Tech’s
DEI backlash is here:
DEI
received a lot of support after the
murder of George Floyd back in 2020, but
support has waned these past few years.It
is supposed to be an overarching effort
aimed at helping all disenfranchised
groups, but when it is targeted, it is
usually for racial reasons. Since
affirmative action in education was
overturned this year, founders and
investors knew that the industry would
find an excuse to go back to how things
were, would find an excuse to stall or
dismiss the little progress made these
past two years. In a sense, they were
right, and the decreased DEI support in
business and tech has created ripple
effects.
The
corporate decline of DEI has been growing
since ABC News reported last July, How
corporate America is slashing DEI
workers amid backlash to diversity
programs:
DEI
positions have been disproportionately
hit by layoffs across industries, but
particularly at tech companies, which
have faced financial challenges as sales
slowed from the blistering pace attained
during the pandemic….From
September 2019 to September 2020, job
postings for diversity, inclusion and
belonging positions on the hiring
website Indeed rose by 56.3%, the
company said.A
LinkedIn study found that chief
diversity and inclusion officer
positions grew by 168.9% from 2019 to
2022.The
rapid organizational movement toward
addressing inequalities was initially
exciting for DEI professionals. But in
just a couple of years, that excitement
wavered as growth rapidly fell apart.“The
honeymoon is over,” Cecil Howard, a DEI
consultant and former chief diversity
officer at the University of South
Florida, told ABC News….Last
year, the layoffs accelerated
significantly, the study found.
Since
DEI had few measurable benefits to
corporations other than virtue signaling,
the loss of those supposed benefits will
not be missed, except by the people with
vested economic interests in the feeding
frenzy that is now ending.
