The Trump administration has spent recent weeks renewing its war against diversity, equity, and inclusion. It’s encouraging white men to bring discrimination complaints, investigating companies under the False Claims Act for suspected unlawful DEI, warning dozens of major law firms of alleged antitrust risks in the Mansfield Certification program (which has since been paused), suing Minnesota for its affirmative action policies, investigating Nike Inc. for alleged discrimination against white workers, and investigating the Baltimore City Health Department for alleged “racially segregated” training.
Against this backdrop, risk-averse leaders might be tempted to shut down their diversity initiatives. Yet organizations can still advance inclusion in a manner that’s not only legally safe, but also politically popular and effective. The key is a distinction between “broad but shallow” diversity work and “narrow but deep” diversity work.
Especially after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, some organizations took a broad but shallow approach to DEI. This involved adopting a wide variety of high-visibility activities such as bias training, heritage month celebrations, diversity retreats, demographic targets, social media campaigns, and enrichment programs reserved for members of marginalized groups.
The problem with this approach is twofold. First is the breadth. The US Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard has made some tools in the DEI toolbox riskier, especially programs that exclude members of dominant groups or involve preferences for non-dominant ones.
The second problem is the shallowness. It’s easy to see how an activity such as posting on social media could be shallow. What’s less intuitive is that some tangible activities can be superficial in their own way.
Consider an organization that responds to its dearth of female leaders by appointing a few women to leadership roles. This action is helpful to those specific women and could measurably improve the organization’s diversity numbers. Yet if the systems that led to the dearth of women in leadership remain unchanged, the long-term impact of such appointments is profoundly limited.
The better approach is “narrow but deep.” This approach involves pulling apart the architecture of organizational decisions, then rebuilding those systems to create equal opportunity.
Take performance evaluation as an example. One study found that an evaluation system that rated professors on a scale from one to 10 disadvantaged women, whereas adjusting to a six-point scale nearly erased the gender gap.
Why? The researchers hypothesized that the top score on a 10-point scale evokes the idea of perfect performance, and gender stereotypes relating to professional perfection mean that women are less likely to receive that score. By contrast, a six-point scale allows for a wider variety of performances to receive top marks.
Imagine auditing a performance evaluation system with this insight in mind. Leaders could explore potential bias embedded in numerical rating scales, as well as in the order or wording of evaluation prompts, whether employees are asked to self-rate, whether evaluations are completed by individuals or groups, and more. Such deep analysis would then enable leaders to reconstruct the system with greater fairness.
Now imagine comprehensively debiasing all the other workplace systems beyond performance evaluation, such as outreach, resume screening, interviewing, onboarding, work assignments, discipline, mentorship, promotion, referrals, feedback, and layoffs. Each of these systems is ripe for deep examination and reform.
This work is “narrow” in the sense that it avoids affirmative action, demographically targeted programs, or the use of bumps or preferences. It shrinks a sprawling set of diversity practices down to a tight focus on systemic debiasing. Yet this work is also “deep” because it digs into every institutional nook and cranny, leaving no area of potential bias unexamined.
Narrow but deep work has three major advantages over the broad but shallow work that came before it. First, it is legally safe. The Supreme Court could easily rule that workplace affirmative action or race-restricted employment opportunities are unlawful. But it will never rule that employers are prohibited from taking bias out of workplace systems.
Second, it is politically popular. Even Andrea Lucas, the chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a virulent opponent of “DEI,” has endorsed a wide array of deep practices that expand equal opportunity in workplace systems, such as auditing job descriptions to remove unnecessary prerequisites like degree requirements, posting promotion opportunities and automatically considering all candidates at a certain level, and implementing standardized leadership development training.
Finally, narrow but deep work is effective. Multiple recent surveys have found that many Americans feel little benefit from DEI. These results are unlikely to replicate if leaders systematically debias organizational processes to ensure fair treatment for all.
DEI work is facing assault. The shift from “broad but shallow” work to “narrow but deep” work enables organizations to get out of the firing line without surrendering their values.
This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Tax, and Bloomberg Government, or its owners.
Author Information
Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow are co-authors of the new book “How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America.” They are, respectively, the faculty director and executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law.
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