How DEI Can Survive This Era of Backlash

Professionals and leaders who care about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in organizations are facing a critical question: Is DEI dead in the U.S.?

It’s true that the current attacks on DEI appear to go beyond the program cuts of a decade ago, which were largely driven by economic factors. Today, restrictive legislation is leading to entire DEI departments being decimated. And the voracity of the media claiming that DEI is under siege and that woke capitalism leads to economic decline has created a climate where indeed it feels unsafe to be an outspoken advocate of DEI.

But there’s another perspective to consider: that DEI is instead experiencing a period of what social movement scholars call “closed doors,” where the obvious route for change is no longer easily accessible.

The Stanford VMware Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab recently convened a gathering of 14 chief diversity officers (CDOs) to unpack what’s happening in their world. The group represented six industries and companies ranging from a couple thousand to over 300,000 employees. Here’s what we found about how DEI leaders are viewing — and continuing — their work during this period of closed doors.

What We Know About Social Movements

Social movements research identifies a critical component of momentum: the opportunity structure, or the means and rules available for a social movement group to achieve its aims. When movements have allies in high places, when the wind is at their back in terms of public sentiment, and when opposing movements are relatively silent and calm, the opportunity structure is considered open. Under these conditions, their claims resonate with people who aren’t in the movement who want to join in the efforts, which makes movement builders more likely to achieve their stated goals. For example, the opportunity structures for DEI opened significantly after the murder of George Floyd and the upsurge in activity of the Black Lives Matter movement. During this time, a significant number of CEOs made public pledges, hired CDOs, and made DEI part of their platforms.

But just as opportunity structures can open, they can also close. When this happens, movements suddenly find themselves moving boulders up hills at best and facing backlash. This can lead to what seems like the demise of a movement.

However, research shows that sometimes movements go into abeyance, which essentially means that the strong networks and identities built in the up-phase of the cycle of change help nurture ongoing efforts during periods of stagnation and reduced visibility.

Strategies that sustain the movements in the face of a closed opportunity structure have been studied deeply. In the period between the U.S. suffrage movement in the early 1920s and the so-called second wave feminism of the 1960s and ’70s, activists sustained the broader women’s movement through interpersonal networks and friendships, informal reading groups, social gatherings, and salons. These strategies allowed them to maintain a feminist collective identity so that when the opportunity structure opened up again in the 1960s, feminists were ready to take advantage of public sentiment, allies in high places, and quiet on the part of those who didn’t agree with the feminist agenda. This led to concerted efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s.

DEI Strategies in a Time of Closed Doors

In hearing from CDOs, we noted striking similarities between current DEI strategies and the tactics used by feminist movement builders during times of closed doors — and uncovered four strategies for continuing the important work of DEI while it’s under attack:

Sustain networks of people engaged in DEI work

Even as many DEI roles are being cut, it’s important to remember that the surge of CDO roles and DEI teams post-2020 means that the networks of experienced DEI advocates and allies are now more robust. According to Alison Dahl Crossley in her study of millennial feminists, in a time of closed doors, maintaining those networks through gatherings, as the emerging women’s movement did in the 1960s, can be an effective tactic.

While in-person reading groups helped sustain the women’s movement during abeyance, today committed DEI advocates and allies can host and attend virtual DEI events and roundtables to advance their work and keep networks intact across roles and geographies — even amid cuts to budgets for travel and in-person development.

In times of mistrust and misinformation, getting people to engage across differences is critical. Facilitating community conversations aimed at helping participants find commonalities and connect with people from different backgrounds can help DEI advocates sustain the work. These discussions should be held in “brave spaces”: supportive environments where people can feel comfortable sharing, learning, and growing together. As one CDO explained to us, while these dialogues can be “extraordinary,” rifts can exist even among DEI advocates. In the end, “people find community in action,” they said.

In addition to community conversations among allies, CDO leadership gatherings are also essential during these times. As DEI teams shrink, CDOs need connections to peers to navigate difficulties and learn from one another. The Women’s Leadership Innovation Lab is curating small-group meetings for CDOs and employee resource group (ERG) leaders to facilitate those exchanges. (Again, providing online spaces for these conversations is essential where travel budgets have been cut.)

Preserve the collective memory

Some DEI tactics have become commonplace and are even built into organizational systems — for example, bias-mitigation strategies such as carefully identifying meaningful criteria and using more specific prompts in performance reviews. Yet the question remains: Who will partner with CDOs to sustain the organizational memory of these tactics?

The CDOs shared that leaders of ERGs have been linchpins to sustaining change. When they’re given adequate support — like protected time, advancement opportunities, leadership development, and compensation for their DEI work — ERG leaders can act as a strategic conduit between employees and organizational leaders. One CDO described the connection between the DEI team and ERG leads as mutually beneficial: “We’re here as strategic advisors with a constant connection. They have executive sponsors in moments of crisis. And that feedback is getting communicated back up.”

Another tactic to embed DEI in the collective memory is to integrate it as a lever in business strategy. “If we don’t connect to the business, people will not care,” explained one CDO. Her company creates products, so managers care how their diverse customer base gains access to those products. In other words, to debunk the myth that DEI is for “DEI’s sake,” CDOs are viewing their business and product strategies through a DEI lens — even if they don’t call what they’re doing “DEI.” Linking customer access to DEI is “how we will convince people this is important work,” the CDO concluded.

Reframe and rename the work for survival

Some companies have recently renamed their DEI programs and practices. For example, Starbucks now refers to their diversity or representation goals as “talent” metrics, and Eli Lilly replaced the acronym “DEI” with simply “diversity.” Some DEI practitioners have criticized these renaming efforts as a rebranding intended to appease critics.

However, we know from decades of social movement research that reframing an issue is often necessary for a movement to draw in new supporters and sustain itself in the face of criticism or closed doors. For example, consider the environmental movement and the way “nature conservation” was reframed as “sustainability,” then “climate change,” and more recently “climate justice.” As the movement became more mainstream, environmentalism became a business imperative, rather than simply a set of principles advocated by diehard environmentalists.

Nurture the collective identity within the DEI community

A final resiliency strategy is to focus on the “club” or the “choir”: the people who are truly committed to the movement and willing to get the work done. Research on social movements indicates that it is common during periods of closed opportunities for movements to retrench and focus on keeping the most committed to the cause engaged. For example, when the opportunity structure was less favorable to Black liberation movements in the U.S., there was a tendency to focus on those most committed to the movement, often letting networks of less-committed activists atrophy.

Thus, while the media has been quick to declare that DEI is dead, our group of CDOs pointed to this alternative interpretation. The external focus has switched to an internal focus on getting the work done.

To concentrate on the most productive work, some of the CDOs we talked to said they’re reducing their scope to reinforce and embed strategies that can continue to have impact. “We used to have so many goals, now we have a few,” one explained. Instead of public pledges, other CDOs are focusing on small wins, or the doable changes that keep the momentum going, step by step. As one CDO told us, her organization continues to analyze hiring and retention demographics to answer questions like, “Why does this cohort take twice as long to get promoted?” Then they “provide a pathway, provide bias-mitigation training, build it into the systems, and make the systems a little more fair.” This work may not be as sexy as public pledges, but it continues to build the strength of the choir.

In Times of Closed Doors, Strategy Is Key

While closed doors can be discouraging, they do not mean that DEI work has ended. As one CDO explained, “Focus is very important.” Just as the suffragettes sustained their work until it emerged as the Women’s Movement, so too will CDOs and change agents continue to work in smart ways to sustain change through networks, tactics, and focusing on the committed.

Copyright 2024 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation. Distributed by The New York Times Syndicate.

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