Save me from rich, white men who insist they and their kind are being discriminated against. Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, majority owner (not the founder) of SpaceX, Tesla, and numerous other leading companies, insists that “DEI [Diversity, equity, and inclusion] is just another word for racism.” He screams, “DEI must DIE. The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination.”
Really? I’m an older, relatively well-off, straight white man, and I know darn well that I owe a lot of my success to the fact that, except for my age, everything in the US economy has been set up to benefit me.
In baseball terms, I started the game on first base. Black men have to get a hit to get on base. Black women step to home plate for their at-bat with two strikes against them.
Musk and his ilk? He grew up with a millionaire, emerald-mine-owning father in South Africa and started on third base.
It used to be worse in this country. The Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin, while the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 laid the groundwork for equal employment opportunities and non-discrimination in the workplace.
The laws were one thing. Making it a workplace reality was another.
Over the next few decades, dedicated diversity professionals began emerging within organizations, often holding titles like Chief Diversity Officer. As businesses became more diverse, companies also started recognizing that diversity is good for business.
While DEI is also about basic fairness, it turns out that businesses that adopt it tend to do better than their rivals. Don’t believe me? How about Goldman Sachs — would you believe it?
The global investment banking giant decided not to take companies public without diverse board representation in 2000. The financial powerhouse did so because evidence showed that companies with diverse boards outperformed those with all-male boards. Specifically, Goldman Sachs noted that companies with at least one woman on their board performed significantly better in their IPOs than those without women. Since then, the company has increased its minimum number of women board members to two. The company has also continued to support black women business owners for solid business reasons, not warm fuzzy feelings.
This is nothing new. In 2012, the global management company McKinsey found that US companies with diverse boards had a 95% higher return on equity.
Get the picture? DEI helps businesses do well, and the results are right there in the balance sheets.
Facts, even accounting facts, count for little as American technology leaders bow to Donald Trump. For some, like Musk and Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg, it’s all about rising to power on the right-wing wave. For others, it’s simply about preserving their billions. Preserving the gains of blacks, gays, older workers — whoever — is not on their priority list.
So, Amazon has halted some of its DEI programs, Meta is killing them, and Microsoft has quietly shuttered its DEI efforts. While this trend has become more obvious since Donald J. Trump won the 2024 election, it’s been coming for a while now. Google and Meta have both shut their doors to diverse employees since 2023.
That year, the Supreme Court’s Trump-friendly majority struck down affirmative action in college admissions. That decision prompted Republican activists and some state attorneys general to target corporate DEI initiatives as discriminatory. Given a choice between fighting a political battle and quietly shutting down their diversity efforts, all too many businesses have folded their DEI tents.
Others, such as Meta — where Zuck is suffering from a middle-aged crisis with his gold chain, newly curled hair, and sudden weird fascination with “masculine energy” — appear to be on their way to getting rid of their existing diverse workforce. He says he wants to “move out low performers faster.” I expect the upcoming 5% cut to come mostly from people of color, older workers, and LGBTQ+ staffers.
You get the picture.
What it all comes down to is that if you’re not a straight white guy, the job market is going to become a lot harder for you. As for companies? They’ll suffer as well. I fear, though, that we’re stuck with this trend until cold, hard financial facts convince corporate leadership that right-wing politics leads to poor business decisions.
