I recall a study a while back that said diversity officers in universities don't actually increase diversity among the student body either.
The broader claim has been that diversity workshops (like sexual harassment training before them) were a defensive strategy to protect corporations against litigation ("see? we did our best to prevent this!"). But while the old-school sexual harassment stuff at least seemed to be related to things that happened in (some) workplaces (don't grope your coworkers, etc); the curriculum of the current DEI stuff seems often way more theoretical.
They are absolutely defensive HR strategies and do nothing more than to protect employers, they might even be actively harmful (unlike sexual harassment trainings)
And some workers spend hours of every day crying about being "misgendered" because someone referred to them by the third-person pronoun matching their actual sex. These people do less work than anyone but the company is terrified to fire them because they will sue over "transphobia."
Companies are catching on; firing these useless promoters of "inclusion" is a start but less visible is all the résumés with pronoun pairs that are deleted. As they should be.
Yea, putting pronouns in a resume/being part of an activist organization is a huge red flag that someone has a condition that causes protesting. Best to toss their resume and move on to someone who doesn’t have such issues. Rendering such people unemployable will in the long term lead to a more harmonious society.
Even more alarming is the lack of judgment exhibited by putting something so unrelated to work into a CV. Yes, it states right in the open that the applicant will make tons of trouble, even if the pronouns are congruent with the applicant's sex. And little *but* trouble if they aren't.
Emotionally-centered people know how to draw boundaries between their private and public lives.
My CV ends with a single word of personal revelation: "multilingual." And even this has useful potential at work. Nothing about being gay, or lifting weights, or playing musical instruments.
Perhaps. But I saw a poll result the other day that 30-40% of students at Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale self-identify as LGTBQ+. One reason cited for the huge numbers is access to preferred treatment. It's logical that some people put this on resumes for the same reason...thinking it will help their hiring prospects.
I have not worked in an office since 2010. I left the USA before I ever heard of this cult.
Directly related to "trans" at work, so if you don't see the connection it's not my fault.
In the last year I've had two friends who had someone like this at work; unproductive, whining all the time, bringing up "gender identity" all the time, even in meetings, management laying a paper trail to use when she sues them for "transphobia."
Since then, several articles about how pronouns in CVs are red flags, they/them is an absolute no.
I guess we need an HR professional to weigh in here. Typically once you being someone in you will put in place a formal process to deal with complaints. That way if someone gets three strikes (or whatever you define) you can let them go and not be held responsible for creating a hostile work environment.
When corporations and colleges create jobs and bureaucracies around diversity they invariably do increase diversity. More people from sought after “marginalized” groups are employed and some are put into positions of real authority. This is very appealing for a variety of reasons, not all of them cynical.
Thank you for the nuanced comment. So many of these forums devolve into knee-jerk Fox News style anti Woke whining. Like anything there were aspects of this woke movement that have positively influenced corporate practices.
“Any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good.”
This is also a powerful argument against schools facilitating social transitions for students with gender dysphoria, especially if parents are kept in the dark.
Hi Daniel, thought the below would interest you. The writer is a trans activist and it's interesting to see how the writer uses sins of omissions/commissions as an attempt to create convincing arguments. I recommend the substack as it contains useful information.
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: DEI training is nothing more than etiquette training....cultural tutelage if you will.....that does not, in any way, improve the material conditions of so-called marginalized people in any way. It's window dressing and nothing more.
If the goal is to improve the lives of vulnerable groups, then increase and make permanent the child tax credit or other means to put money into the hands of working poor people. It's way more bang for the buck than hiring some over-credentialed critical studies grad for $130,000 per year to give trainings haranguing hapless office workers.
Sure, of course many support it. But the point of my comment is that shaming middle class office workers and teaching them etiquette accomplishes nothing to address society level inequality. How much does encouraging white people to "un-pack their knapsack of privilege" help the working poor?
The point is that improving people's material conditions is far and away more meaningful policy than shaming white collar workers on their lunch break. The grandparent comment was just using a specific example of such a policy for the sake of illustration.
Usually I just nod my head, but calling DEI programs "psychological intervention" is absurd. As described in this article by this particular DEI program is shaming, plain and simple. This program is meant for adults. Their job is to shame people into adopting certain views (I will not assume those views actually changed). And yes, shaming is meant to make you feel like crap. To isolate you from other people, until you adopt their views.
To quote George Carlin, sometimes we just need to use simple, honest and direct language. Shaming people is effective and that's why it's still used.
It's only effective temporarily, though. Most people just shut up and seethe, and then when the first opportunity arises, they exact whatever revenge they can. Backlash is real!
I think the point here is a bit more subversive: these DEI people *claim* they are doing something that has the effect of a powerful psych intervention. So we say okay, if that’s what you’re doing, show the evidence, just like any other intervention would be expected to. And then sue their asses for fraud.
“I’m also curious whether, in some instances — and I’m basing this on the research and reporting I’ve done on this subject — it turned out that these CDOs were bringing ideas with them that were far more trouble than they were worth.”
Happy to satisfy your curiosity. The answer is: YES!
Well, one less thing to be curious about!
The great subtext of so much of Jesse Singal’s writing & podcasting may be “How (as an intelligent sympathetic white cis hetero liberal male) do you deal with the fact that so many of the loudest voices for trans rights seemingly have personality disorders (or some form of mental illness) and so many DEI professionals & journalists covering race right now are ignorant, reckless and incompetent?”
Retreating to a sincere, almost comically genteel “I’m also curious whether ...” (with an “and I’m basing this on the reporting and research I’ve done”) may not be a bad strategy.
I would love to push back on the corporate culture “this book will solve our problem, here’s a 90 minute company-wise meeting with its author” by requiring all the self-help stuff to be treated and assessed as a psychological intervention, but I worry that’s both going to be unpopular with the target audience for these things (managers engaged in a box checking exercise) and maybe overstating the intended effects of these trainings. Is a seminar on the book “Extreme Ownership” a psychological intervention? I don’t like where this path leads…
I think a more clear cut case, and one with less unintended consequences, is for people to bring Title VI suits if they feel they’ve been targeted and harassed by a white fragility style training on the basis of their race. I’m happy to see these sorts of trainings are on their way out anyway, but I’d much rather have a contractor mocking an employee for their “white tears” seen as a legal peril than asking the C suite to start learning what a validating psychological measure is.
I agree with you completely. I don't give a hoot whether these programs "work" or not. If you put a gun to someone's head, you'd probably get that person to agree to say or do anything you wanted them to do.
I do care that employees are being victimized by an army of third-party bullies. Sue them up the ying-yang. Sue the pants off these training companies and let them go bankrupt. Also, sue the corporations that hired the trainers. And send the trainers to prison for psychological abuse and torture.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The George Floyd case, in which one man's life ended due to police brutality, sent police officers to prison. Then the DEI training companies and their minions should also do time for leading at least one man to kill himself. Make an example of this case, and let it forever end the whole, revolting DEI shakedown.
DEI "training" (not actually a form of training) should often be seen as one or more of the following:
* Political indoctrination.
* Harassment
* Psychological intervention
Because it *IS* often one or more of these things. (Stanley Ridgley makes the third point in *Brutal Minds.*)
I'm a little concerned that emphasizing the psychological angle encourages us to minimize the biggest problem here, i.e. the first one. DEI "training" is almost always political indoctrination, and no one should be subjected to that as a condition of employment. I don't attend my "mandatory" faculty DEI indoctrination sessions, and, thus far, the university has pestered me about it, but not tried to force me to do it.
And don't forget: university orientation is gearing up all across the country. Tens of thousands of young students, without a single college course under their belts, are about to undergo leftist DEI brainwashing.
Last year I asked to observe my university's orientation DEI sessions, and I was denied permission. To emphasize: a faculty-member was denied permission to see what "student affairs" employees are telling our students about "DEI." I've offered to endure the training this year in order to lead a session--I expect to be turned down. (The application is constructed so as to make thoughtcriminals such as myself easy to spot.)
DEI is mainly a mechanism for institutionalizing the extremist political views of the progressive left. Don't let the nice-sounding words fool you. Thinking that DEI is ok because "diversity" is a nice-sounding word is like thinking that the Patriot Act was ok because "patriot" sounds nice.
Race is just so complicated. I know I keep bringing this up but it’s just a perfect example of how weird this stuff gets in people’s heads. My step-dad was from a small island in Micronesia. He loved Hitler, discriminated openly against many races, and the number of times I got called white boy or something similar is just so staggering. All that was happening in one guy.
I also grew up in a small town where my step-dad was basically the only minority. It’s not like prejudice didn’t exist or that it existed against him. It just existed against the small neighboring town where everyone looked almost exactly the same as us. People like to form in-groups and out-groups. It’s a thing that people do.
Other than basic non-confrontational politeness training this stuff has always just seemed so culty.
I find the slow, sheepish withdrawal from cultic adherence to DEI programs a source of endless amusement. All these companies know that they went to far, that they merely chased a fad, but they are too embarassed to outright admit that. So instead we see this slow winding down of programs without anyone really admitting that's what they are doing. It's so cowardly I can't help but laugh.
The Fortune 500 company I work for has been fairly reasonable about DEI training. It is strongly suggested, but not required. I have completely avoided it because I think the DEI industry is one of the bigger grifts going. I decided to take one course anyway (just to reinforce my opinion of DEI) and was quite surprised. The training on "Holding Inclusive Meetings" was about ...getting extroverts to shut up and introverts to talk during meetings. Not at all what I expected and it actually had some pretty good pointers, speaking as an introvert. After that experience I may yet try D and E courses. It will be interesting to see what an E course looks like. As a defense contractor "E" tends to mean Equality and not Equity. Equity drives the rates up too much.
Honestly if all DEI training focused on small, actionable steps that people can take to improve hiring and make sure that everyone on a team feels comfortable discussing their ideas during meetings, nobody would have much reason to object to it.
I've had good DEI sessions (focused on e.g., how to address X blatantly racist statement* if it comes up in the classroom) and very, very bad DEI sessions (focused on hectoring white teachers about living in a white supremacist society). It's honestly a crapshoot every meeting as to which we're going to get.
*That is, racist even to a non-woke observer, such as a student shouting "go back to the jungle" (!) at a black student.
I'm glad you got to attend one that made your life better!
My company has a very good “inclusive hiring” training that’s mostly focused on getting people to be more objective about assessing qualifications for a given job rather than just hiring based on vibes. It’s helpful. But like the one you describe, I think that’s because it’s focused on process improvement, not changing people’s inner selves.
The DEI department at my Fortune 500 is one of the least diverse in the company. Mostly female, with sizable minorities of black males and homosexuals -- if you're not one of those three, you're likely not in DEI. Even less diverse is our HR ("People") department: 75% female; " and our Learning and Community" department : 90% female." Engineering, IT, and Sales are more of a mix. But "diversity" as we practice it seems mostly policy that no department looks too white or too male. Beyond that, there's no real attempt at balance.
At my previous job my team was almost entirely white and female (I'm a white man). At departmental meetings they'd always talk about how important DEI was for the company and give updates about how the company as a whole was performing in our "diversity metrics." The fact that our team was extremely NOT diverse was never addressed, but you know that if the gender balance of the team was flipped it would definitely have been a "problem."
Careers dominated by females (e.g., nursing, teaching, HR, publishing) are never criticized for their lack of diversity. Nor do there seem to be protests of not enough female bricklayers, house painters, landscapers, or trash collectors.
The departmental leadership in particular was 100% white women (let me be very clear here: every one of them was smart, competent, and 100% there due to their skills. I'd happily work with any one of them again). But whenever this was brought up in the context of these diversity discussions, it was politely waved off.
Honestly it seemed that way at the company as a whole. They'd talk lovingly each month about the great diversity programs were had, all the exciting things we had coming up, how important it was to the company to have these "diverse viewpoints".....and then in every hiring meeting I was ever a part of the only thing that mattered was competence and experience, someone's gender and socioeconomic background never came up. Which on the one had is good, a person's skills and experiences should be the only things that mattered, but it did make all the DEI hullaballoo seem laughably pointless
Publishing gets diversity complaints about race, not so much about sex. NPR did a piece about publishing a little while ago that stated the industry as 80% female. The article's only complaint: at this disparity was that senior management was only 65% female.
"What else [besides psychological intervention] do you call something that is designed to change the way people think and act?" A Sunday sermon, an activist's speech, an advice column, some college courses—these are all designed to change the way people think and act. The main difference is that no one is forcing you to attend those. A scolding from a friend or relative also falls into this category, but an organization isn't paying big bucks for your sibling or child or friend to lecture you so you're on your own there.
It's no wonder that people are so mentally unhealthy with all these unregulated interventions happening to them. However, labeling DEI training as a pscyhological intervention may veer uncomfortably close to the realm of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and "intent doesn't matter" as long as one person felt injured. The Bilkszto case is tragic, but arguably he was treated much worse by the TDSB than by the trainers.
DEI never struck me as psychological intervention. I think that is an insult to the psychology profession …psychology aims to improve peoples’ personal lives. DEI never pretended to improve peoples, personal lives, or help people.
It just came across to me, simply as a religious ceremony with elements of emotional abuse disguised as a workplace seminar.
I recall a study a while back that said diversity officers in universities don't actually increase diversity among the student body either.
The broader claim has been that diversity workshops (like sexual harassment training before them) were a defensive strategy to protect corporations against litigation ("see? we did our best to prevent this!"). But while the old-school sexual harassment stuff at least seemed to be related to things that happened in (some) workplaces (don't grope your coworkers, etc); the curriculum of the current DEI stuff seems often way more theoretical.
They are absolutely defensive HR strategies and do nothing more than to protect employers, they might even be actively harmful (unlike sexual harassment trainings)
And some workers spend hours of every day crying about being "misgendered" because someone referred to them by the third-person pronoun matching their actual sex. These people do less work than anyone but the company is terrified to fire them because they will sue over "transphobia."
Companies are catching on; firing these useless promoters of "inclusion" is a start but less visible is all the résumés with pronoun pairs that are deleted. As they should be.
Yea, putting pronouns in a resume/being part of an activist organization is a huge red flag that someone has a condition that causes protesting. Best to toss their resume and move on to someone who doesn’t have such issues. Rendering such people unemployable will in the long term lead to a more harmonious society.
Even more alarming is the lack of judgment exhibited by putting something so unrelated to work into a CV. Yes, it states right in the open that the applicant will make tons of trouble, even if the pronouns are congruent with the applicant's sex. And little *but* trouble if they aren't.
Emotionally-centered people know how to draw boundaries between their private and public lives.
My CV ends with a single word of personal revelation: "multilingual." And even this has useful potential at work. Nothing about being gay, or lifting weights, or playing musical instruments.
Perhaps. But I saw a poll result the other day that 30-40% of students at Brown, Harvard, Princeton, Yale self-identify as LGTBQ+. One reason cited for the huge numbers is access to preferred treatment. It's logical that some people put this on resumes for the same reason...thinking it will help their hiring prospects.
I have not worked in an office since 2010. I left the USA before I ever heard of this cult.
Directly related to "trans" at work, so if you don't see the connection it's not my fault.
In the last year I've had two friends who had someone like this at work; unproductive, whining all the time, bringing up "gender identity" all the time, even in meetings, management laying a paper trail to use when she sues them for "transphobia."
Since then, several articles about how pronouns in CVs are red flags, they/them is an absolute no.
What is your understanding of the purpose of being an employee?
Have you ever worked with a chronic troublemaker?
A man who insists on calling himself a woman is too mentally disturbed for most jobs.
DEI and the "transgender" nonsense are two sides of the same idiotic coin.
Troll
They're both spelled W-O-K-E.
Yeah agreed
I guess we need an HR professional to weigh in here. Typically once you being someone in you will put in place a formal process to deal with complaints. That way if someone gets three strikes (or whatever you define) you can let them go and not be held responsible for creating a hostile work environment.
Yes, and I'd add that the definition of diversity used in much of the DEI discourse is quite narrow: it is no more than skin deep.
How many diversity officers does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A thousand. One to hold the bulb in place, and the other 999 to rotate the entire universe.
When corporations and colleges create jobs and bureaucracies around diversity they invariably do increase diversity. More people from sought after “marginalized” groups are employed and some are put into positions of real authority. This is very appealing for a variety of reasons, not all of them cynical.
Thank you for the nuanced comment. So many of these forums devolve into knee-jerk Fox News style anti Woke whining. Like anything there were aspects of this woke movement that have positively influenced corporate practices.
“Any psychological intervention may turn out to do more harm than good.”
This is also a powerful argument against schools facilitating social transitions for students with gender dysphoria, especially if parents are kept in the dark.
Hi Daniel, thought the below would interest you. The writer is a trans activist and it's interesting to see how the writer uses sins of omissions/commissions as an attempt to create convincing arguments. I recommend the substack as it contains useful information.
https://www.erininthemorning.com/
I've said it before, but it's worth repeating: DEI training is nothing more than etiquette training....cultural tutelage if you will.....that does not, in any way, improve the material conditions of so-called marginalized people in any way. It's window dressing and nothing more.
If the goal is to improve the lives of vulnerable groups, then increase and make permanent the child tax credit or other means to put money into the hands of working poor people. It's way more bang for the buck than hiring some over-credentialed critical studies grad for $130,000 per year to give trainings haranguing hapless office workers.
Sure, of course many support it. But the point of my comment is that shaming middle class office workers and teaching them etiquette accomplishes nothing to address society level inequality. How much does encouraging white people to "un-pack their knapsack of privilege" help the working poor?
The point is that improving people's material conditions is far and away more meaningful policy than shaming white collar workers on their lunch break. The grandparent comment was just using a specific example of such a policy for the sake of illustration.
Usually I just nod my head, but calling DEI programs "psychological intervention" is absurd. As described in this article by this particular DEI program is shaming, plain and simple. This program is meant for adults. Their job is to shame people into adopting certain views (I will not assume those views actually changed). And yes, shaming is meant to make you feel like crap. To isolate you from other people, until you adopt their views.
To quote George Carlin, sometimes we just need to use simple, honest and direct language. Shaming people is effective and that's why it's still used.
It's only effective temporarily, though. Most people just shut up and seethe, and then when the first opportunity arises, they exact whatever revenge they can. Backlash is real!
I think the point here is a bit more subversive: these DEI people *claim* they are doing something that has the effect of a powerful psych intervention. So we say okay, if that’s what you’re doing, show the evidence, just like any other intervention would be expected to. And then sue their asses for fraud.
"I understand that at a certain point I come across as a nerd"
You say that like it's a bad thing. 😁
“I’m also curious whether, in some instances — and I’m basing this on the research and reporting I’ve done on this subject — it turned out that these CDOs were bringing ideas with them that were far more trouble than they were worth.”
Happy to satisfy your curiosity. The answer is: YES!
Well, one less thing to be curious about!
The great subtext of so much of Jesse Singal’s writing & podcasting may be “How (as an intelligent sympathetic white cis hetero liberal male) do you deal with the fact that so many of the loudest voices for trans rights seemingly have personality disorders (or some form of mental illness) and so many DEI professionals & journalists covering race right now are ignorant, reckless and incompetent?”
Retreating to a sincere, almost comically genteel “I’m also curious whether ...” (with an “and I’m basing this on the reporting and research I’ve done”) may not be a bad strategy.
I would love to push back on the corporate culture “this book will solve our problem, here’s a 90 minute company-wise meeting with its author” by requiring all the self-help stuff to be treated and assessed as a psychological intervention, but I worry that’s both going to be unpopular with the target audience for these things (managers engaged in a box checking exercise) and maybe overstating the intended effects of these trainings. Is a seminar on the book “Extreme Ownership” a psychological intervention? I don’t like where this path leads…
I think a more clear cut case, and one with less unintended consequences, is for people to bring Title VI suits if they feel they’ve been targeted and harassed by a white fragility style training on the basis of their race. I’m happy to see these sorts of trainings are on their way out anyway, but I’d much rather have a contractor mocking an employee for their “white tears” seen as a legal peril than asking the C suite to start learning what a validating psychological measure is.
I agree with you completely. I don't give a hoot whether these programs "work" or not. If you put a gun to someone's head, you'd probably get that person to agree to say or do anything you wanted them to do.
I do care that employees are being victimized by an army of third-party bullies. Sue them up the ying-yang. Sue the pants off these training companies and let them go bankrupt. Also, sue the corporations that hired the trainers. And send the trainers to prison for psychological abuse and torture.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander. The George Floyd case, in which one man's life ended due to police brutality, sent police officers to prison. Then the DEI training companies and their minions should also do time for leading at least one man to kill himself. Make an example of this case, and let it forever end the whole, revolting DEI shakedown.
I'd be interested if those lawsuits materialized
DEI "training" (not actually a form of training) should often be seen as one or more of the following:
* Political indoctrination.
* Harassment
* Psychological intervention
Because it *IS* often one or more of these things. (Stanley Ridgley makes the third point in *Brutal Minds.*)
I'm a little concerned that emphasizing the psychological angle encourages us to minimize the biggest problem here, i.e. the first one. DEI "training" is almost always political indoctrination, and no one should be subjected to that as a condition of employment. I don't attend my "mandatory" faculty DEI indoctrination sessions, and, thus far, the university has pestered me about it, but not tried to force me to do it.
And don't forget: university orientation is gearing up all across the country. Tens of thousands of young students, without a single college course under their belts, are about to undergo leftist DEI brainwashing.
Last year I asked to observe my university's orientation DEI sessions, and I was denied permission. To emphasize: a faculty-member was denied permission to see what "student affairs" employees are telling our students about "DEI." I've offered to endure the training this year in order to lead a session--I expect to be turned down. (The application is constructed so as to make thoughtcriminals such as myself easy to spot.)
DEI is mainly a mechanism for institutionalizing the extremist political views of the progressive left. Don't let the nice-sounding words fool you. Thinking that DEI is ok because "diversity" is a nice-sounding word is like thinking that the Patriot Act was ok because "patriot" sounds nice.
That poor man became just another egg in the DEI revolutionary omelette.
Race is just so complicated. I know I keep bringing this up but it’s just a perfect example of how weird this stuff gets in people’s heads. My step-dad was from a small island in Micronesia. He loved Hitler, discriminated openly against many races, and the number of times I got called white boy or something similar is just so staggering. All that was happening in one guy.
I also grew up in a small town where my step-dad was basically the only minority. It’s not like prejudice didn’t exist or that it existed against him. It just existed against the small neighboring town where everyone looked almost exactly the same as us. People like to form in-groups and out-groups. It’s a thing that people do.
Other than basic non-confrontational politeness training this stuff has always just seemed so culty.
I find the slow, sheepish withdrawal from cultic adherence to DEI programs a source of endless amusement. All these companies know that they went to far, that they merely chased a fad, but they are too embarassed to outright admit that. So instead we see this slow winding down of programs without anyone really admitting that's what they are doing. It's so cowardly I can't help but laugh.
Would you attend a three hour meeting about respecting coworkers’ “preferred pronouns?” I sure as hell wouldn’t.
The Fortune 500 company I work for has been fairly reasonable about DEI training. It is strongly suggested, but not required. I have completely avoided it because I think the DEI industry is one of the bigger grifts going. I decided to take one course anyway (just to reinforce my opinion of DEI) and was quite surprised. The training on "Holding Inclusive Meetings" was about ...getting extroverts to shut up and introverts to talk during meetings. Not at all what I expected and it actually had some pretty good pointers, speaking as an introvert. After that experience I may yet try D and E courses. It will be interesting to see what an E course looks like. As a defense contractor "E" tends to mean Equality and not Equity. Equity drives the rates up too much.
Honestly if all DEI training focused on small, actionable steps that people can take to improve hiring and make sure that everyone on a team feels comfortable discussing their ideas during meetings, nobody would have much reason to object to it.
I've had good DEI sessions (focused on e.g., how to address X blatantly racist statement* if it comes up in the classroom) and very, very bad DEI sessions (focused on hectoring white teachers about living in a white supremacist society). It's honestly a crapshoot every meeting as to which we're going to get.
*That is, racist even to a non-woke observer, such as a student shouting "go back to the jungle" (!) at a black student.
I'm glad you got to attend one that made your life better!
My company has a very good “inclusive hiring” training that’s mostly focused on getting people to be more objective about assessing qualifications for a given job rather than just hiring based on vibes. It’s helpful. But like the one you describe, I think that’s because it’s focused on process improvement, not changing people’s inner selves.
The DEI department at my Fortune 500 is one of the least diverse in the company. Mostly female, with sizable minorities of black males and homosexuals -- if you're not one of those three, you're likely not in DEI. Even less diverse is our HR ("People") department: 75% female; " and our Learning and Community" department : 90% female." Engineering, IT, and Sales are more of a mix. But "diversity" as we practice it seems mostly policy that no department looks too white or too male. Beyond that, there's no real attempt at balance.
At my previous job my team was almost entirely white and female (I'm a white man). At departmental meetings they'd always talk about how important DEI was for the company and give updates about how the company as a whole was performing in our "diversity metrics." The fact that our team was extremely NOT diverse was never addressed, but you know that if the gender balance of the team was flipped it would definitely have been a "problem."
Careers dominated by females (e.g., nursing, teaching, HR, publishing) are never criticized for their lack of diversity. Nor do there seem to be protests of not enough female bricklayers, house painters, landscapers, or trash collectors.
The departmental leadership in particular was 100% white women (let me be very clear here: every one of them was smart, competent, and 100% there due to their skills. I'd happily work with any one of them again). But whenever this was brought up in the context of these diversity discussions, it was politely waved off.
Honestly it seemed that way at the company as a whole. They'd talk lovingly each month about the great diversity programs were had, all the exciting things we had coming up, how important it was to the company to have these "diverse viewpoints".....and then in every hiring meeting I was ever a part of the only thing that mattered was competence and experience, someone's gender and socioeconomic background never came up. Which on the one had is good, a person's skills and experiences should be the only things that mattered, but it did make all the DEI hullaballoo seem laughably pointless
Are you kidding? Publishing is notoriously toxic with diversity complaints.
Publishing gets diversity complaints about race, not so much about sex. NPR did a piece about publishing a little while ago that stated the industry as 80% female. The article's only complaint: at this disparity was that senior management was only 65% female.
"What else [besides psychological intervention] do you call something that is designed to change the way people think and act?" A Sunday sermon, an activist's speech, an advice column, some college courses—these are all designed to change the way people think and act. The main difference is that no one is forcing you to attend those. A scolding from a friend or relative also falls into this category, but an organization isn't paying big bucks for your sibling or child or friend to lecture you so you're on your own there.
It's no wonder that people are so mentally unhealthy with all these unregulated interventions happening to them. However, labeling DEI training as a pscyhological intervention may veer uncomfortably close to the realm of trigger warnings, safe spaces, and "intent doesn't matter" as long as one person felt injured. The Bilkszto case is tragic, but arguably he was treated much worse by the TDSB than by the trainers.
DEI never struck me as psychological intervention. I think that is an insult to the psychology profession …psychology aims to improve peoples’ personal lives. DEI never pretended to improve peoples, personal lives, or help people.
It just came across to me, simply as a religious ceremony with elements of emotional abuse disguised as a workplace seminar.