DEI is falling out of style.
In the aftermath of George Floyd’s death in police custody, many companies made highly publicized vows about “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives filled with all the typical left-wing rhetoric about race, having “conversations” and “doing better.”
Doing better how exactly? Focusing on your customer base and delivering quality service?
No. In 2020, doing better meant emphasizing identity politics in the workplace.
DEI is just a long-winded way of promoting discrimination through hiring initiatives and creating a toxic work culture where employees view each other by their race, ethnicity, gender and national origin. It is the antithesis of individuality and a vehicle for identitarianism.
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Four years later, many businesses have realized that focusing on skin color or sex is not the greatest idea.
For example, Microsoft just laid off its entire internal DEI team, according to a Business Insider report on Monday.
“True systems-change work associated with DEI programs everywhere are no longer business critical or smart as they were in 2020,” a leader of the team wrote in an email “sent to thousands of employees,” according to the outlet.
The email said the DEI team was eliminated because of “changing business needs” as of July 1, the report said.
Should companies disband DEI teams and initiatives?
It was unknown how many people had lost their jobs.
In 2020, Microsoft pledged to double the number of black leaders in the company by 2025.
Undoubtedly, shifting focus away from DEI will hamstring those race-based hiring efforts.
Microsoft is not alone.
Bloomberg reported that Zoom laid off its DEI staff in February. Meanwhile, Google and Meta made DEI cuts last year, according to CNBC.
It’s almost as if instituting identity-based hiring practices and promoting division in the workplace aren’t so great for business, no?
Microsoft spokesman Jeff Jones maintained these initiatives are still important to the company — although he dropped the E-for-equity in DEI in a statement to Business Insider.
“Our focus on diversity and inclusion is unwavering and we are holding firm on our expectations, prioritizing accountability, and continuing to focus on this work,” Jones said.
This is essentially corporate babble to dance around the fact that those employees were propaganda officers on whom Microsoft was tired of wasting money, but it would look outright embarrassing to denounce the effort as a whole at this point.
It was hard in 2020 to make the intellectual leap from a black man’s death in Minneapolis to the seemingly overnight push for a narrative infecting every waking moment of life.
If anyone is still wasting money on DEI, the motivation will surely dissipate.
These initiatives do not promote productivity or create profit. They only sow division.
