LTP News Sharing:
In a commentary published at RealClearMarkets, Free Enterprise Project Executive Director Stefan Padfield says Verizon may have defrauded the FCC with its DEI hypocrisy, and he explains why a recent statement from Lockheed Martin is “the sort of announcement that people who are looking for corporations to get back to neutral have been looking for.”
He argues that the solution is pretty straight forward:
The current DEI hypocrisy is completely unnecessary. Instead of continuing to divide employees on the basis of race and sex in the name of DEI, corporations can pivot to colorblind solutions for inequality.
Read his commentary in full below.
When it comes to corporate DEI agendas, we’ve seen a lot of apparent hypocrisy lately. One example is Verizon, the subject of a May 17 headline that announced “Verizon shuts down DEI policies for its 105,000 workers,” purportedly in exchange for the FCC’s approval of Verizon’s acquisition of Frontier, while a board member had made comments on May 14 suggesting Verizon was simply playing games with the FCC. Specifically, Axios quoted Oscar Health CEO Mark Bertolini on talking with the Trump administration: “You don’t use certain words, like DEI, bad word. … I sit on the Verizon board, I chair their finance committee, our DEI effort is alive and well, it’s just not called that anymore.”
Stefan Padfield
In response to this, I attended the virtual Verizon shareholder meeting on May 22 and submitted the following question:
It was recently reported that the FCC approved a deal Verizon was seeking after it dropped at least some DEI policies. However, a Verizon board member was quoted as saying, “our DEI effort is alive and well, it’s just not called that anymore.” This sounds like Verizon may have defrauded the FCC. Should shareholders be worried?
While Verizon presented a milder version of that question to the CEO, his response seemed typical of the current platitude-driven, evasive approach to DEI that likely satisfies no one. He made the now common allusions to striving to ensure Verizon’s workforce reflects the demographics of the community, which is essentially yet another attempt to repackage quotas. He also essentially claimed that Verizon was both changing its DEI program while not changing its DEI program by acknowledging that changes were made in response to the FCC’s concerns while stressing that nothing had changed about Verizon’s core principle of inclusivity. It must be exhausting to avoid painful cognitive dissonance here.
Thankfully, not all corporations are stuck in this DEI shell game. For example, Lockheed Martin recently made the sort of announcement that people who are looking for corporations to get back to neutral have been looking for. In relevant part, Lockheed said:
We will not have goals or incentives based on demographic representation or Affirmative Action Plans…. We will continue to help America and its allies achieve peace through strength by recruiting, retaining and promoting the best aerospace and defense talent in the world, with the only criteria being merit and performance…. we have permanently sunset our Business Resource Groups and Employee Networks organized around demographics, identities or advocacy.
Perhaps most importantly, the current DEI hypocrisy is completely unnecessary. Instead of continuing to divide employees on the basis of race and sex in the name of DEI, corporations can pivot to colorblind solutions for inequality.
Specifically, it can reasonably be argued that every race- and sex-based inequality rests on a foundation of colorblind inequality. For example, when people express concern about wealth gaps impacting black communities, they can be understood as noting that the lowest income brackets contain a disproportionate number of blacks. Accordingly, raising the floor when it comes to income on a colorblind basis should improve diversity (i.e., the overall representation of blacks in higher income brackets will improve). The same analysis should be applicable to every race- and sex- based gap, and would likely improve the pipeline problems that explain most, if not all, the current related gaps we see in hiring and promotion. As just one other example, diversity concerns in recruitment can be addressed by expanding outreach to untapped institutions and regions on a colorblind basis.
A concrete example of this type of colorblind initiative may be seen in JPMorganChase’s recent report on a program for expanding high-quality career pathways in Texas. Does anyone seriously believe that improving student outcomes and cultivating alternative pathways to well-paying careers on a colorblind basis won’t have outsized positive impacts on historically marginalized communities?
Critically, shifting from DEI’s race- and sex-based initiatives to colorblind initiatives avoids the costly resentment and stigma created by DEI, not to mention the associated potential legal, political, and market backlash. It also extricates corporations from having to defend ridiculous propositions like Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey being “oppressed” while the unemployed white guy in West Virginia is an “oppressor” simply due to the color of their skin, or that values we should be promoting in order to address inequalities – like being on time – should be dismissed as tools of “white supremacy” and “systemic racism.”
There are many reasons to conclude that race- and sex-obsessed DEI initiatives do far more harm than good. (For a good overview of some of the reasons for this, see the collection of reflections by black thought leaders titled, “Rolling Back DEI Rewards Black Americans Instead of Crippling Them.”) Trying to defend these initiatives has turned corporations into hypocrites. It’s time for corporations to get back to neutral, stop dividing us on the basis of race and sex, and promote colorblind solutions to inequality.
Author: Stefan Padfield
