Making Sense of the DEI Soup

DEI. Pluralism. Meritocracy. Fairness. 🤯

It’s confusing and counterproductive to use different words with different meanings for different goals.

Inspired by an IdeaCast podcast by Profs. Iris Bohnet and Siri Chilazi on fairness in the workplace, I created a very basic paradigm to share how I think they all come together.

DEI should be reserved strictly for monitoring important metrics. This is backed by the research that tells us it does not work as intended when it comes to training (1).

Meritocratic decision-making, comes next, to drive personnel decisions.

Finally, perceived organizational fairness, shepherded by transparent policies and decision-making, are the last layer to create psychological safety.

These three elements work in concert to create a culture of belonging.

(1) F. Dobbin and A. Kalev, “Why Doesn’t Diversity Training Work? The Challenge for Industry and Academia,” 𝐴𝑛𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑜𝑝𝑜𝑙𝑦 𝑁𝑜𝑤 10, no. 2 (2018): 48–55.