Karima-Catherine Goundiam is the founder and chief executive officer of digital strategy firm Red Dot Digital and business matchmaking platform B2BeeMatch.
We’ve all seen the news about how several major American companies such as Meta and Amazon have recently scrapped their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and how President Donald Trump put all U.S. DEI staff on paid leave before the offices in question were shut down. In a true feat of bizarre and twisted logic, controversial right-wing tech leader Elon Musk (along with Mr. Trump himself) has even gone so far as to blame the wildfires that recently devastated Los Angeles on DEI.
These companies are arguing that they want to hire people “as individuals,” based on their merit and without considering protected characteristics such as race or gender.
I’ve written previously about the problems with merit-based systems by which companies purport to hire “only the best.” It sounds good on paper, but our traditional ways of choosing “the best” candidates are mired in a legacy of faulty logics and systemic inequality. As a result, supposed merit-based hiring often just isn’t – and maintaining the fiction that it is keeps companies from building the kind of diverse teams that are well known for being most beneficial for innovation and the bottom line.
Opinion: Canada must stand firm on DEI as U.S. corporations retreat
Our current cultural moment is a complicated one for DEI. Five years ago, in Minneapolis, a Black man named George Floyd was murdered by a white police officer. The public outcry about this awful event triggered a massive ripple effect across the U.S. and Canada. It motivated a lot of people who hadn’t previously thought much about racial injustice to suddenly learn new ideas and reflect on their own contribution to the problem. As people scrambled to learn, bookstores couldn’t keep up with the demand for books about anti-racism and justice for Black people. And faced with this new zeitgeist, many companies felt compelled to announce new efforts to improve their diversity through DEI programs.
But in my professional and personal circles, a lot of Black people voiced that they expected this to be a fickle thing. Sure enough, as early as 2022, observers in the publishing world began to notice a cooling of the “George Floyd Effect” as sales of Black-authored books slowed down (though they remain higher than pre-2020 levels). And now we’re seeing how for some key corporations – and perhaps more to come – the wave of DEI efforts was also a temporary one.
Personally, I wouldn’t be mad if DEI efforts were reformed. I think a lot of DEI programs were poorly designed and not implemented effectively enough to make the difference they were supposed to. DEI programs are often an add-on; organizations often don’t see DEI as an intrinsic part of how they do business. These programs are often essentially a recruitment strategy, but many companies don’t extend their thinking to questions of retention, policy change or change management. Many companies have not made enough effort to ensure that once their new Black and racialized team members were in place, the company provided mechanisms for cultural transformation within the organization, support for the advancement of those candidates and other longer-term measures. So the sentiment may have been good, but the implementation hasn’t always been well done, and it has created resentment, disappointment and cynicism.
But I am mad at the idea of nixing DEI programs. Killing DEI is not the answer! Quite the opposite. As we face the U.S. election results and Canadian polls, this isn’t the time to backtrack, it’s the time to double down. Companies need to commit to building workplaces that reflect the world as it is, not trying to retain the insular worlds many retrograde thinkers are trying to cling to. Diversity isn’t a buzzword; it’s the foundation of progress. If companies don’t see that, they’ll be left behind.
All the research shows that companies with strong DEI perform better.
At this juncture, I believe that both individuals and companies will show their true colours. If a company and its leadership believe in the value of diversity and the potential for DEI efforts to produce real change within the company and beyond, they’ll continue to pursue DEI. If they don’t, they’ll nix it – and in so doing, demonstrate that it was only ever a PR move, designed to convey a good impression at one time but never meant to last or succeed. And I believe both kinds of companies will reap what they sow. When a company stands firm in its values, it earns employee trust and loyalty, which is hard to come by. Being wishy-washy or reversing direction on such a key principle is a betrayal of trust not only for BIPOC employees, but also for the many white people who really have learned more about racial justice and who now expect better of their employers (and politicians, but that’s a different article).
Of course, Canada is not the United States. I predict we might see Canadian-rooted organizations behave somewhat differently than the subsidiaries of American companies operating here. The fates of our two countries are deeply intertwined, but we are, in fact, separate nations with different legal systems, different business contexts and different cultures.
I want to see Canada’s business leaders take a more logical and evidence-based approach to questions of diversity in their workplaces and remember that the known business benefits of DEI don’t shift based on political currents.