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Almost a decade ago, I started a business called Rent-A-Minority, which enabled companies to hire a minority ethnic person whenever they needed an injection of diversity to boost their image. I had a variety of inclusivity-enriching hires available, including an “ethnically ambiguous” category and a selection of smiling Muslim women (guaranteed not to support Islamic State or your money back).
Like every good startup, Rent-A-Minority posted testimonials from clients and influencers on its website. I made up all the blurbs, because that is the Silicon Valley way: fake it till you make it. One of those fake comments was from Donald Trump, who was still considered a long shot for the presidency in January 2016, when my business launched. “When I’m president, I’ll shut this site down,” Trump’s blurb read.
My business, just in case you are reeling in horror, was a joke. I launched it to satirise the superficial and patronising way in which many companies were approaching diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI). Not to toot my gay Palestinian horn, but the website went viral. Ironically, it briefly got one minority ethnic person (me) a lot of business speaking to companies around the world about how to approach diversity in a more meaningful manner.
Rent-A-Minority may have been a joke, but that fake Trump testimonial seems to have been a prophecy. Trump’s second term has become a crusade against DEI. Hours into his presidency, he signed two executive orders targeting “radical and wasteful” DEI programmes. If a federal initiative has anything remotely to do with the issue, Trump has decreed that it must be eliminated. References to the Enola Gay aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, for example, were marked for deletion by the Department of Defense. Why? Because the aircraft’s name has the word “gay” in it.
DEI has been turned into a scapegoat. When a passenger jet and a US army helicopter crashed over Washington DC in January, killing 67 people, one of the first things Trump said was that the collision could have been the result of diversity hiring. This has been a favourite talking point of the right for a while – in January 2024, Elon Musk spluttered on X about how the aviation industry had “prioritized DEI hiring over safety” – but it has gone from the fringe of politics to the frontline.
Now that the political landscape has changed, many companies that used to talk the big talk about inclusivity have changed their tune. Some, such as Costco and Apple, have defended their diversity policies and chosen to stay the course. But roughly 20% of companies in the S&P 100 – including Meta, Amazon, Target and McDonald’s – have retreated from DEI commitments since Trump’s re-election, according to a Bloomberg News analysis.
To understand where we are today in the US, we have to look at where we have been. DEI may be a relatively new term, but the idea has roots in the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made it illegal for most employers with 25 or more staff (reduced to 15 or more by the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972) to discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex and national origin. At the same time, affirmative action policies emerged to try to redress the historical under-representation of racial minorities and women.
That under-representation was immense: in 1966, African Americans comprised about 11% of the US population yet held fewer than 1% of all “officials and managers” roles (the most senior category defined by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which captured the data). By 2013, that had risen to 6.8%. As for women, they made up 9.4% of officials and managers in 1966, rising to 38.6% in 2013.
While DEI has its roots in addressing injustices, there is a strong business case for it. According to research by McKinsey, companies with a representation of women exceeding 30% (which puts them in the top quartile) are significantly more likely to perform well financially than those with 30% or fewer. Companies in McKinsey’s top quartile for ethnic diversity show an average “financial advantage” of 27% over others.
Joan Williams, a law professor and the founding director of the Equality Action Center at UC Law San Francisco, has done data‑based research that shows that, when approached properly, DEI initiatives result in more effective organisations. And “properly” doesn’t mean forcing employees to sit through one-off training sessions on unconscious bias, Williams stresses; it means introducing structural tweaks that remove bias in hiring and performance reviews, such as “keeping track of who’s rejected based on lack of ‘culture fit’ and looking for demographic patterns”. In other words, when you create an environment where all talent – regardless of what they look like or where they come from – can rise to the top, rather than just the people whose faces and backgrounds “fit”, you are more likely to get something approaching meritocracy.
“We all want a meritocracy, but too often we don’t have them,” Williams says. “There is one group in professional workplaces where over 90% believe they are working in meritocracies – and that’s white men. Every other group has sharply less confidence that they are working in meritocracies because they feel that they are being held to a different standard.” And those people tend to be correct. “We did 22 DEI experiments inside companies,” says Williams. “One company was horrified to find that they were hiring white men who had lower ratings than women and people of colour who weren’t hired.”
In short, DEI should always have been treated as a serious business issue. Instead, it has often been approached as a box-ticking exercise or a PR manoeuvre. Never was that truer than after the murder of George Floyd in 2020: as racial justice demonstrations erupted around the world, corporations suddenly started shouting about DEI from the rooftops. Listings for roles in DEI increased by 55% in the two months after Floyd’s death, according to the recruitment website Glassdoor.
“The amount of money I made starting May 2020 until about 2023 – I’ve never made so much money in my entire life,” says Akilah Cadet, a DEI practitioner and the author of White Supremacy Is All Around. Some of that money came from brands who genuinely seemed to care, she says, but others were just in it to look good. Now, however, the jobs have dried up. “I’ve laid off my staff. I have a much smaller team. I’m being punished as a result of people no longer wanting to care about people they should have been caring about in the first place,” Cadet says.
She is not the only one feeling punished. “Imagine that you were working for a company where you had tools in place, access to an executive coach, a programme that got you into a leadership track,” Cadet says. “These individuals had support and were told they were valued. Heterosexual, non-disabled, cisgendered white men and women have always had that [validation] in the workplace. And it will still be there after the attack on DEI, but it won’t be for people who don’t identify as those groups.
“That’s the bigger unfortunate thing that’s happening here: ‘You mattered – and guess what? I’m going to remind you that you don’t matter again.’”
The Trump administration’s crusade seems to be less about effectiveness and more about reminding certain people that they don’t matter. “It is not about diversity, equity and inclusion,” says Vernā Myers, a DEI pioneer who was the vice-president of inclusion strategy at Netflix until September 2023. “This is a takedown of structures that have been put together for over 30, 40 years to really get us to be the America that we say we are.”
The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah shares that sentiment. “Let’s call this what it really is: resegregation,” she wrote in a column last month. “I mean it in the sense that a Black woman would never even be considered for a federal job or a management position at a big company – the way it was in, say, the 1960s. It is not ‘inclusion’ the Republicans want to get rid of, it’s integration.”
Trump’s purge of DEI sympathisers within federal ranks has already affected some high-ranking people of colour. In late February, Trump abruptly fired the US air force general CQ Brown Jr as chair of the joint chiefs of staff. Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who is now the defence secretary, had previously questioned whether Brown had been made chair because he was Black. “Was it because of his skin colour? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt – which on its face seems unfair to CQ. But since he has made the race card one of his biggest calling cards, it doesn’t really much matter,” wrote Hegseth in one of his books.
Other Trump staffers have been even more blunt. “Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” wrote Darren Beattie, who now has a senior job in the state department, on X in October. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.” The implication seems to be that white men should be automatically considered competent until proved otherwise; everyone else should be seen as a “diversity hire”.
Heather Mac Donald, a fellow of the right-leaning thinktank the Manhattan Institute and the author of the book The Diversity Delusion, makes a similar argument. “If you know that every institution is practising race and gender preferences, you have no confidence that, if you’re in an emergency room and a Black doctor walks through the door, that doctor has been hired on the basis of merit and not race,” she says.
But what about white men? Wouldn’t it be ignorant to assume that every white man in a position of prominence was chosen solely on the basis of his qualifications and not, say, because he played golf with the right people or his face “fitted”? “Today, to be a white male is to be at the bottom of the hiring pool,” Mac Donald says. “You have to be twice, three times as good to be considered as a white male. The main elite institutions have made absolute preference for anybody other than heterosexual white males.”
The idea that being white or male puts you at a disadvantage in the recruitment process is not reflected in reality, says Williams. “We have over 10 years of data, including very recent data that shows that, in professional workplaces, white men report wildly less bias and wildly more fairness,” she says. “There are some white men who are really hurting, but those are non-elite white men. The economic and cultural position of elite white men is still pretty peachy.”
White men still occupy most of the top-level roles in US companies. According to a 2023 study, “ethnically and racially diverse executives hold just 12.5% of CEO, CFO and COO positions in Fortune 500 and S&P 500 companies … while women occupy 13.7% of the seats”. Plenty of studies show that white-sounding names get called back for jobs more than Black‑sounding ones.
No matter what the data says, however, there is still a sense among a lot of white men that women, LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities are suddenly the ones getting every advantage in life while they are being discriminated against. The podcast host Scott Galloway, who is very far from a rabid rightwinger, has argued that anti-discrimination laws exist already and there is no need for DEI: “Corporations and universities are now advantaging 76% of the populace [minority groups and women in the US] – and when you’re advantaging 76% of the populace, you’re not advantaging anybody.”
Galloway is right that some DEI interventions haven’t benefited anyone: numerous studies show that the most common programmes, including mandatory diversity training, increase resentment in the workplace.
“Too often in the past, DEI language used highly technical ‘social justice warrior’ language and you had scolding training without much guidance,” Williams says. “A lot of people found it irritating.” This isn’t to say that we should just tear up DEI altogether, however. We have an opportunity to remake it in a more meaningful and effective manner. We are at an inflection point, but it doesn’t have to be a regressive one, says Williams: “The hope is – and there’s some evidence of this – that the attack on DEI will cause people to actually focus on the evidence and making structural changes that make sure people are treated consistently.”
Myers is also optimistic. “We’ve made so many inroads that it will be very hard, especially in the young generation, to convince them that somehow a whitewashed version of talent is a place where they want to be,” she says. “The reason that I’m optimistic is because I believe that humanity is always evolving. We will always move forward. Will there be obstacles and retrenchment? Yes. But I think we’re better positioned than we ever have been to resist.”
