I have not thought or said much about DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) over the years. Not because I don’t care about the espoused ideals — I suppose I do, rather a lot — but because corporate DEI efforts have always struck me as ineffective and bland; bolted on at best, if not actively compensating for evil behavior.
I know how crisis PR works. The more I hear a company natter on and on about how much it cares for the environment, loves diversity, values integrity, yada yada, the more I automatically assume they must be covering their ass for some truly heinous shit behind closed doors.
My philosophy has historically been that actions speak louder than words. I would one million times rather do the work, and let my actions speak for themselves, than spend a lot of time yapping about what I’m doing or why.
I also resent being treated like an expert in “diversity stuff”, which I manifestly am not. As a result, I have always shrugged off any idea that I might have some personal responsibility to speak up or defend these programs.
Recent events (the tech backlash, the govt purge) have forced me to sit down and seriously rethink my operating philosophy. It’s one thing to be cranky and take potshots at corporate DEI efforts when they seem ascendant and powerful; it’s another when they are being stamped out and reviled in the public mind.
Actually, my work does not speak for itself
It took all of about thirty seconds to spot my first mistake, which is that no, actually, my work does not and cannot speak for itself. 🤦 No one’s does, really, but especially not when your job literally consists of setting direction and communicating priorities.
Maybe this works ok at a certain scale, when pretty much anyone can still overhear or participate in any topic they care about. But at some point, not speaking up at the company level sends its own message.
If you don’t state what you care about, how are random employees supposed to guess whether the things they value about your culture are the result of hard work and careful planning, or simply…emergent properties? Even more importantly, how are they supposed to know if your failures and shortcomings are due to trying but failing or simply not giving a shit?
These distinctions are not the most important (results will always matter most), but they are probably pretty meaningful to a lot of your employees.
The problem isn’t the fact that companies talk about their values, it’s that they treat it like a branding exercise instead of an accountability mechanism.
Fallacy #1: “DEI is the opposite of excellence or high performance”
There are two big category errors I see out there in the world. To be clear, one is a lot more harmful (and a lot more common, and increasingly ascendant) than the other, but both of these errors do harm.
The first error is what I heard someone call the “seesaw fallacy”: the notion that DEI and high performance are somehow linked in opposition to each other, like a seesaw; getting more of one means getting less of the other.
This is such absolute horseshit. 🙄 It fails basic logic, as well as not remotely comporting with my experience. You can kind of see where they’re coming from, but only by conveniently forgetting that every team and every company is a system.
Nobody is born a great engineer, or a great designer, or a great employee of any type. Great contributors are not born, they are forged — over years upon years of compounding experiences: education, labor, hard work, opportunities and more.
So-called “merit-based” hiring processes act like outputs are the only thing that matter; as though the way people show up on your doorstep is the way they were fated to be and the way they will always be. They don’t see people as inputs to the system — people with potential to grow and develop, people who may have been held back or disregarded in the past, people who will achieve a wide range of divergent outcomes based on the range of different experiences they may have in your system.
Fallacy #2: “DEI is the definition of excellence or high performance”
There is a mirror image error on the other end of the spectrum, though. You sometimes hear DEI advocates talk as though if you juuuust build the most diverse teams and the most inclusive culture, you will magically build better products and achieve overwhelming success in all of your business endeavors.
This is also false. You still have to build the fucking business! Your values and culture need to serve your business and facilitate its continued existence and success.
With the small caveat that … DEI isn’t the way you define excellence unless the way you define excellence is diversity, equity and inclusion, because “excellence” is intrinsically a values statement of what you hold most dear. This definition of excellence would not make sense for a profit-driven company, but valuing diverse teams and an inclusive culture over money and efficiency is a perfectly valid and coherent stance for a person to take, and lots of people do feel this way!
There is no such thing as the “best” or “right” values. Values are a way of navigating territory and creating alignment where there IS no one right answer. People value what they value, and that is their right.
DEI gets caricatured in the media as though the goal of DEI is diverse teams and equitable outcomes. But DEI is better seen as a toolkit. Your company values ought to help you achieve your goals, and your goals as a business usually some texture and nuance beyond just profit. At Honeycomb, for example, we talk about how we can “build a company people are proud to be part of”. DEI can help with this.
Let’s talk about MEI (Merit, Excellence and Intelligence)
Until last month I remained blissfully unaware of MEI, or “Merit, Excellence and Intelligence” (sic), and if you were too until just this moment, I apologize for ruining your party.
This idea that DEI is the opposite of MEI is particularly galling to me. I care a lot about high-performing teams and building an environment where people can do the best work of their lives. That is why I give a shit about building an inclusive culture.
An inclusive culture is one that sets as many people as possible up to soar and succeed, not just the narrow subset of folks who come pre-baked with all of life’s opportunities and advantages. When you get better at supporting folks and building a culture that foregrounds growth and learning, this both raises the bar for outcomes for everyone, and broadens the talent base you can draw from.
Honestly, I can’t think of anything less meritocratic than simply receiving and replicating all of society’s existing biases. Do you have any idea how much talent gets thrown away, in terms of unrealized potential? Let’s take a look at some of those stories from recent history.
If you actually give a shit about merit, you have to care about inclusion
Remember the Susan Fowler blog post that led to Travis Kalanick’s ouster as CEO of Uber in 2017? I suggest going back and skimming that post again, just to remind yourself what an absolutely jaw-dropping barrage of shit she went through, starting with being propositioned for sex by her very own manager on her very first day.
In “What You Do Is Who You Are”, investor Ben Horowitz wrote,”By all accounts Kalanick was furious about the incident, which he saw as a woman being judged on issues other than performance.” He believed that by treating her this way, his employees were failing to live up to their stated values around meritocracy.
I think that’s a flawed (but revealing) response to the situation at hand. Treating this like a question of “merit” suggests that they should be prioritizing the needs of whoever was most valuable to the company. And it kind of seems like that’s exactly what Kalanick’s employees were trying to do.
Susan was brilliant, yes; she was also young (25!) small, quiet, with a soft voice, in a corporate environment that valued aggression and bombast. She was early in her career and comparatively unproven; and when she reported her engineering manager’s persistent sexual advances and retaliatory actions to HR, she was told that HE was the high performer they couldn’t afford to lose.
Ask yourself this: would the manager’s behavior have been any more acceptable if Susan had been a total fuckup, instead of a certifiable genius? (NO. 😡)
Susan’s piece also noted that the percentage of women in Uber’s SRE org dropped from 25% to 3% across that same one year interval. Alarm bells were going off all over the place for an entire year, and nobody gave a shit, because an inclusive culture was nowhere on their radar as a thing that mattered.
There is no rational conversation to be had about merit that does not start with inclusion
You might know (or think you know) who your highest performers are today, but you do not know who will be on that list in six months, one year, five years. Your company is a system, and the environment you build will drive behaviors that help determine who is on that list.
Maybe you have a Susan Fowler type onboarding at your company right now. How confident are you that she will be treated fairly and equitably, that she will feel like she belongs? Do you think she might be underestimated due to her gender or presentation? Do you think she would want to stick around for the long haul? Will she be motivated to do her best work in service of your mission? Why?
Can you say the same about all your employees, not just ones you already know to be certifiable geniuses?
That’s inclusion. That’s how you build a real fucking meritocracy. You start with “do not tolerate the things that kneecap your employees in their pursuit of excellence”, and ESPECIALLY not the things that subject them to the compounding tax of being targeted for who they are. In life as in finance, it’s the compound interest that kills you, more than the occasional expensive purchase.
There’s more to merit and excellence than just inclusion, obviously, but there’s no rational adult conversation to be had about merit or meritocracy that doesn’t start there.
Susan left the tech industry, by the way. She seems to be doing great, of course, but what a loss for us.
If you give a shit about merit, tell me what you are doing to counteract bias
Anyone who talks a big game about merit, but doesn’t grapple with how to identify or counteract the effects of bias in the system, doesn’t really care about merit at all. What they actually want is what Ijeoma Oluo calls “entitlement masquerading as meritocracy” (“Mediocre”).
The “just world fallacy” is one of those cognitive biases that will be with us forever, because we have such a deep craving for narrative coherence. On a personal level, we are embodied beings awash with intrinsic biases; on a societal level, obviously, structural inequities abound. No one is saying we should aim for equality of outcomes, despite what some nutbag MEI advocates seem to think.
But anyone who truly cares about merit should feel compelled to do at least some work to try and lean against the ways our biases cause us to systematically under-value, under-reward, under-recognize, and under-promote some people (and over-value others). Because these effects add up to something cumulatively massive.
In the Amazon book “Working Backwards”, chapter 2, they briefly mention an engineering director who “wanted to increase the gender diversity of their team”, and decided to give every application with a female-gendered name a screening call. The number of women hired into that org “increased dramatically”.
That’s it — that’s the only tweak they made. They didn’t change the interview process, they didn’t “lower the bar”, they didn’t do anything except skip the step where women’s resumes were getting filtered out due to the intrinsic biases of the hiring managers.
There’s no shame in having biases — we all have them. The shame is in making other people pay the price for your unexamined life..
DEI is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals
I am by no means trying to muster a blanket defense of everything that gets lumped under DEI, just to be clear. Some of it is performative, ham-handed, well-intentioned but ineffective, disconnected or a distraction from real problems; diversity theater; a steam valve to vent off any real pressure for change; nitpicky and authoritarian, flirts with thought policing, or just horrendously cringe.
I don’t know how much I really care whether corporate DEI programs live or die, because I never thought they were that effective to start with. Jay Caspian Kang wrote a great piece in the New Yorker that captured my feelings on the matter:
The problem, at a grand scale, is that D.E.I.’s malleability and its ability to survive in pretty much every setting, whether it’s a nearby public school or the C.I.A., means that it has to be generic and ultimately inoffensive, which means that, in the end, D.E.I. didn’t really satisfy anyone.
What it did was provide a safety valve (I am speaking about D.E.I. in the past tense because I do think it will quickly be expunged from the private sector as well) for institutions that were dealing with racial and social-justice problems. If you had a protest on campus over any issue having to do with “diverse students” who wanted “equity,” that now became the provenance of D.E.I. officers who, if they were doing their job correctly, would defuse the situation and find some solution—oftentimes involving a task force—that made the picket line go away.
~Jay Caspian Kang, “What’s the Point of Trump’s War on DEI?”
It’s a symbolic loss of something that was only ever a symbolic gain. Corporate DEI programs as we know them sprung up in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, but I haven’t exactly noticed the world getting substantially more diverse or inclusive since then.
Which is not to say that tech culture has not gotten more diverse or inclusive over the longer arc of my career; it absolutely, definitely has. I began working in tech when I was just a teenager, over 20 years ago, and it is actually hard to convey just how much the world has changed since then.
And not because of corporate DEI policies. So why? Great question. 🙌
Tech culture changed because hearts and minds were changed
I think social media explains a lot about why awareness suddenly exploded in the 2010s. People who might never have intentionally clicked a link about racism or sexism were nevertheless exposed to a lot of compelling stories and arguments, via retweets and stuff ending up in their feed. I know this, because I was one of them.
The 2010s were a ferment of commentary and consciousness-raising in tech. A lot of brave people started speaking up and sharing their experiences with harassment, abuse, employer retaliation, unfair wage practices, blatant discrimination, racism, predators.. you name it. People were comparing notes with each other and realizing how common some of these experiences were, and developing new vocabulary to identify them — “missing stair”, “sandpaper feminism”, etc.
If you were in tech and you were paying attention at all, it got harder and harder to turn a blind eye. People got educated despite themselves, and in the end…many, many hearts and minds were changed.
This is what happened to me. I came from a religious and political background on the far right, but my eyes were opened. The more I looked around, the more evidence I saw in support of the moral and intellectual critiques I was reading online. I began waking up to some of the ways I had personally been complicit in doing harm to others.
The “unofficial affirmative action movement” in tech, circa 2010-2020
And I was not alone. Emily once offhandedly referred to an “unofficial affirmative action movement” in tech, and this really struck a chord with me. I know so many people whose hearts and minds were changed, who then took action.
They worked to diversify their personal networks of friends and acquaintances; to mentor, sponsor, and champion underrepresented folks in their workplaces; to recruit, promote, and refer women and people of color; to invite marginalized folks to speak at their conferences and on their panels; to support codes of conduct and unconscious bias training; and to educate themselves on how to be better allies in general.
All of this was happening for at least a decade leading up to 2020, when BLM shook up the industry and led to the creation of many corporate DEI initiatives. Kang, again:
What happened in many workplaces across the country after 2020 was that the people in charge were either genuinely moved by the Floyd protests or they were scared. Both the inspired and the terrified built out a D.E.I. infrastructure in their workplaces. These new employees would be given titles like chief diversity officer or C.D.O., which made it seem like it was part of the C-suite, and would be given a spot at every table, but much like at Stanford Law, their job was simply to absorb and handle any race stuff that happened.
The pivot from lobbying/persuading from the outside to holding the levers of formal power is a hard, hard one to execute well. History is littered with the shells of social movements that failed to make this leap.
You got here because you persuaded and earned credibility based on your stories and ideals, and now people are handing you the reins to make the rules. What do you do with them? Uh oh.
It’s easier to make rules and enforce them than it is to change hearts and minds
I think this happened to a lot of DEI advocates in the 2020-2024 era, when corporations briefly invested DEI programs and leaders with some amount of real corporate power, or at least the power to make petty rules. And I do not think it served our ideals well.
I just think…there’s only so much you can order people to do, before it backfires on you. Which doesn’t mean that laws and policies are useless; far from it. But they are limited. And they can trigger powerful backlash and resentment when they get overused as a means of policing people’s words and behaviors, especially in ways that seem petty or disconnected from actual impact.
When you lean on authority to drive compliance, you also stop giving people the opportunity to get on board and act from the heart.
MLK actually has a quote on this that I love, where he says “the law cannot make a man love me”:
“It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, religion and education will have to do that, but it can restrain him from lynching me. And I think that’s pretty important also. And so that while legislation may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men.”
~ Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
There are ways that the DEI movement really lost me around the time they got access to formal levers of power. It felt like there was a shift away from vulnerability and persuasion and towards mandates and speech policing.
Instead of taking the time to explain why something mattered, people were simply ordered to conform to an ever-evolving, opaque set of speech patterns as defined by social media. Worse, people sometimes got shamed or shut down for having legitimate questions.
There’s a big difference between saying that “marginalized people shouldn’t have to constantly have to defend their own existence and do the work of educating other people” (hard agree!), and saying that nobody should have to persuade or educate other folks and bring them along.
We do have to persuade, we do have to bring people along with us. We do have to fight for hearts and minds. I think we did a better job of this without the levers of formal power.
Don’t underestimate what a competitive advantage diversity can be
People have long marveled at the incredible amount of world class engineering talent we have always had at Honeycomb — long before we even had any customers, or a product to sell them. How did we manage this? The relative diversity of our teams has always been our chief recruiting asset.
There is a real hunger out there on the part of employees to work at a company that does more than the bare minimum in the realm of ethics. Especially as AI begins chewing away at historically white collar professions, people are desperate for evidence that you can be an ambitious, successful, money-making business that is unabashed about living its values and holding a humane, ethical worldview.
And increasingly, one of the main places people go to look for evidence that your company has ethical standards and takes them seriously is…the diversity of your teams.
Diversity is an imperfect proxy for corporate ethics, but it’s not a crazy one.
The diversity of your teams over the long run rests on your ability to build an inclusive culture and equitable policies. Which depends on your ability to infuse an ethical backbone throughout your entire company; to balance short-term and long-term investments, as you build a company that can win at business without losing its soul.
And I’m not actually talking about junior talent. Competition is so fierce lower on the ladder, those folks will usually take whatever they can get. (💔) I’m talking about senior folks, the kind of people who have their pick of roles, even in a weak job market. You might be shocked how many people out there will walk away from millions/year in comp at Netflix, Meta or Google, in order to work at a company where ethics are front and center, where diversity is table stakes, where their reporting chain and the executive team do not all look alike.
The longer you wait to build in equity and inclusion, the tougher it will be
Founders and execs come up to me rather often and ask what the secret is to hiring so many incredible contributors from underrepresented backgrounds. I answer: “It’s easy!…if you already have a diverse team.”
It is easier to build equitable programs and hire diverse teams early, and not drive yourself into a ditch, than it is to go full tilt with a monoculture and face years of recovery and repair. The longer you wait to do the work, the harder the work is going to be. Don’t put it off.
As I wrote a while back:
“If you don’t spend time, money, attention, or political capital on it, you don’t care about it, by definition. And it is a thousand times worse to claim you value something, and then demonstrate with your actions that you don’t care, than to never claim it in the first place.”
“You must remind yourself as you do, uneasily, queasily, how easily ‘I didn’t have a choice’ can slip from reason to excuse. How quickly ‘this isn’t the right time’ turns into ‘never the right time’. You know this, I know this, and I guarantee you every one of your employees knows this.”
It can be a massive competitive advantage if you build a company that knows how to develop a deep bench of talent and set people up for success.
Not only the preexisting elite, the smartest and most advantaged decile of talent — for whom competition will always be cutthroat — but people from broader walks of life.
Winning at business is what earns you the right to make bigger bets and longer-term investments
As the saying goes, “Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM” — and nobody ever had the failure of their startup blamed on the fact that they hired engineers away (or followed management practices) from Google, Netflix or Facebook, regardless of how good or bad those engineers (or practices) may be.
If you want to do something different, you need to succeed. People cargo cult the culture of places that make lots of money.
If you want your values and ideals to spread throughout the industry, the most impactful thing you can possibly do is win.
It’s a reality that when you’re a startup, your resources are scarce, your time horizons are short. You have to make smart decisions about where to invest them. Perfection is the enemy of success. Make good choices, so you can live to fight another day.
But fight another day.
If you don’t give a shit, don’t try and fake it
Finally let me say this: if you don’t give a shit about diversity or inclusion, don’t pretend you give a shit. It isn’t going to fool anyone. (If you “really care” but for some reason DEI loses every single bake-off for resources, friend, you don’t care.)
And honestly, as an employee, I would rather work for a soulless corporation that is honest with itself and its employees about how decisions get made, than for someone who claims to care about the things I value, but whose actions are unpredictable or inconsistent with those values.
Listen.. There is never just one true way to win. There are many paths up the mountain. There are many ways to win. (And there are many, many, many more ways to fail.)
Nothing that got imported or bolted on to your company operating system was ever going to work, anyway. 🤷 If it doesn’t live on in the hearts and minds of the people who are building the strategy and executing on it, they are dead words.
When I look at the long list of companies who say they are rolling back mentions to DEI internally, I don’t get that depressed. I see a long list of companies who never really meant it anyway. I’m glad they decided to stop performing.
You need a set of operating practices and principles that are internally consistent and authentic to who you are. And you need to do the work to bring people along with you, hearts and minds and all.
So if we care about our ideals, let’s go fucking win.
