But if we point out the McKinsey study that finds companies with greater ethnic and cultural diversity were 36% more likely to experience above-average profitability compared to their counterparts, the facade of the conservative dedication to free market capitalism crumbles.
Look, plenty of DEI programs weren’t done well, especially affirmative action programs at some prestigious universities where the design of the admissions programs were boneheaded at best and illegal at worst.
But in truth, many DEI opponents who just “want everyone to be treated equally with merit” don’t actually realize that “merit-only” doesn’t mean utopian pure equality, it means going back to a status quo state where the concept of merit is tainted by personal biases.
I also think this idea of “merit-only” is hyper-individualist, because this type of thinking resists the consideration of the social interaction of humans. A business owner needs employees who can not only have merit on their own but also work well together.
Typical corporate DEI was never about race/gender quotas or anything malicious like that, it was just training to help avoid employees/managers being biased toward solely hiring and working with people who are aligned with their world view.
And it isn’t just cultural or racial or gender-based, it’s also based on things like diversity of background. E.g., maybe we don’t just hire people with a degree from a prestigious university, maybe someone who got experience through some non-traditional way is also qualified.
A lot of the focus of the training is also just informing employees about how they can respect/accommodate different types of thought and culture so that the diverse people you already hired don’t decide to quit.
For my anecdote, I worked with a black woman in an SRE role who said she almost never lasts more than a year at an employer before she can’t stand someone she works with being racist/biased against her and has to quit for her own sanity. This is a person that is getting hired because she’s highly qualified but keeps getting pushed out because employees frequently have bias against her ingrained in them. Turnover costs tens of thousands of dollars for each occurrence, and that’s one area where DEI training is meant to help.
And yes, that’s why it’s important to use people’s preferred pronouns. Employees are supposed to be adults and not big dumb babies who can’t adapt to basic changes in the world. The company already hired a trans or non-binary person because they are the most qualified for the role, and now they want employees to not ruin it for them and cost the company a bunch of money because their bigotry causes them to quit.