Groundbreaking report from Meltzer Center offers new insight on DEI efforts

On June 11, NYU Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging co-published the most comprehensive report on workplace inclusion efforts since the Trump administration began issuing executive orders attacking diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. The report, “Risks of retreat: The enduring inclusion imperative," surveyed 2,500 employees, executives, and legal leaders at medium- and large-sized organizations.  Employees and executives surveyed overwhelmingly supported DEI efforts in their workplaces. The report was co-published with the organization Catalyst, which focuses on gender equity in the workplace. It was coauthored by Alixandra Pollack, David Glasgow LLM ’14, Tara Van Bommel, PhD, Christina Joseph, and Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law Kenji Yoshino.

We asked Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center, about the surprising responses the survey received and how DEI initiatives function in a rapidly changing cultural environment.

Tell us about the process of creating the survey and reaching out to executives.
There has been a lot of public polling on attitudes toward DEI, but they’re just polling anyone in the country. We decided to limit it to people who’ve had direct experience with DEI programs and policies within their workplace.  

We wanted to ask some questions about attitudes toward DEI, because there has been such a controversy around [the topic] in the political and social arena. We wanted to find out “What do people who are actually experiencing these programs every day think about DEI?” Also, we were curious about whether there were any differences in how people feel about the acronym “DEI” versus the actual values and programs that fit underneath the DEI umbrella.

We also set out to ask people about how they’re navigating all the backlash to DEI. So we specifically sought a good sample of leaders within organizations—not just employees—like legal leaders in the Office of General Counsel as well as C-suite leaders, so that we could get a sense of what they are doing differently now compared to what they did in the past. For example, are they changing the branding of what they’re calling DEI? Are they reducing their commitment to DEI policies? How are they thinking about the threats that they’re experiencing to DEI—is it making them pull back? Where do they think the biggest threats are coming from? Do they think it’s all coming from the opponents of DEI, or do they also think there are some threats associated with retreating from DEI?

Our goal was to write a handbook for leaders on how to navigate the current landscape, but we felt that the handbook would be aided by some data to allow leaders to benchmark themselves against what everyone else is experiencing right now. So that’s why we wanted there to be an empirical piece. We could have just written a white paper or a think piece about how to navigate the current environment, but what we were missing was real empirical survey data to back up that analysis.

What was the most surprising piece of information that you learned?
I was surprised by the degree of support for DEI that came through in the report. I was expecting it to be lower. If you look at a lot of the published opinion surveys of the general public, there is slightly more support for DEI than lack of support, but it’s not the huge numbers that we see in this survey. My main explanation for why our survey is different is that we did limit it to people in medium and large organizations—500 people plus—who have active DEI programs within their organizations.

I sense that the people who are the most opposed to DEI are not necessarily experiencing DEI directly. They’re just seeing news reports about DEI. They’re seeing the culture war arguments. Whereas a lot of the people that are actually within organizations that have things like employee resource groups or parental leave policies or whatever it might be, they’re actually thinking, ”I like this. I like that we have a workplace that’s validating me and where I feel respected and included, and so I support DEI.”

I think another surprising finding was the level to which people said they’re rebranding their DEI initiatives. What came through in the survey was that 78 percent of C-suite leaders and 83 percent of legal leaders said they’re rebranding their DEI programs with terms like employee engagement, workplace culture, fairness, or belonging. So that’s a pretty whopping number for me. I was expecting that to be lower, and what it suggests is that there’s a really significant turn away from the actual acronym DEI toward other kinds of terminology.

It seems like companies are not getting rid of these programs, but they are sort of rebranding them and renaming them to potentially avoid further political scrutiny.
I think what’s going on is quite complicated. What you’ve just described is what many leaders think that they’re doing. Because 62 percent of those same leaders who said that they are rebranding also say that their commitment to DEI is equal to, or even stronger, than it was before. So their view is, “We’re just making cosmetic shifts, we’re not really changing the underlying commitment to these programs.”

The employees who took the survey seem to be a little bit more skeptical of that narrative. When they were asked, “Do you think that DEI is going to be as embedded in the workplace as it has been in the past?,” their numbers were significantly lower than what the leaders predicted, and employees were also significantly less likely to support a rebrand.

So the story that I take away from that—which is consistent with a lot of the anecdotal conversations that I’ve been having—is that the leaders think, “We’re just making little tweaks to allow this work to survive.” The employees are more cynical. They tend to think, “I don’t really trust what these leaders are saying. I think this organization is actually pulling back from the values of DEI, and I don’t like that.”

We hear that all the time in conversations with leaders where they say, “We’re having a bit of a PR crisis within the company because our employees aren’t happy with the approach that we’re taking, and we’re having to reassure people that we are as committed as we were before.” And employees are saying, “How can you tell us you’re as committed as you were before when you’re changing all these programs or you’re cutting budgets?” So I think it depends on your perception as to what’s really going on. But I do think this narrative—that some organizations aren’t really abandoning DEI, they’re just changing how they talk about it—is definitely part of the story.

If they are making changes, are they seeing any impact on their business?
I think it’s hard to quantify exactly how. Target is an example—I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines about a boycott. There were also some recent headlines about McDonald’s getting some boycott activity around their DEI programs. I’m not sure if that’s something that I could say is happening across the board. There are lots of organizations that have announced a retreat from some aspects of DEI, and it’s not as though they’re all experiencing a boycott.

But that issue did come through in the data as a concern. We talk about talent, financial, legal, and reputational risks in the report, and one of those is financial, in the sense that respondents would say they were more likely to purchase products from organizations that supported DEI. So I think it’s too early to assess in a rigorous way how much organizations have been harmed in either direction based on their policy decisions on this front. But I do think organizations should think very carefully before they change their values in this area, because that could lead to potential damage to their brand.

Another thing that was interesting was the finding that eliminating DEI might leave companies open to traditional discrimination litigation. How would that work?
Part of the reason why organizations adopt DEI programs in the first place is to try to reduce the risk of bias and discrimination within their company. Because the argument for DEI is to say, “There are a bunch of groups within your organization—often members of marginalized groups, people of color, women, LGBTQ individuals, and the like—who might feel less of a sense of belonging in your organization, who might experience more incidents of both implicit and explicit bias in the workplace. And we need DEI policies to help create a more respectful and inclusive environment for those individuals. So we’re going to have policies that allow people to express themselves more authentically in the workplace. We’re going to have policies around ensuring that LGBTQ families are treated equitably in our employee benefits programs, or that women who go on maternity leave and return to work are still able to access the same quality of work assignments and promotion opportunities as men, or that we’re teaching people tools for respectful and inclusive communication so that people don’t experience bias and discrimination.”

There’s a lot of impetus behind DEI policies to create fairness and to de-bias processes so that everyone has a fair opportunity to succeed and to thrive within an organization. We have been worried for a long time that if you just rip away all of that and say, “We’re not doing any of that anymore,” you’re just creating potentially more bias and discriminatory behavior within your workplace. What you’re saying now is, “We’re not actually going to pay any attention to whether or not our hiring processes are fair to members of these groups who may have been experiencing barriers to their own advancement within the organization.” And you might unleash more incidents of bias within the organization if people aren’t being given the tools to communicate with one another respectfully.

So you may be reducing your risk of getting sued by disgruntled, reverse discrimination plaintiffs who say that DEI programs are discriminating against them, but you’re increasing your risk of getting sued by traditional discrimination plaintiffs.

We’ve been making this argument for a really long time, but this is the first time that we’ve had data to back that up, where leaders within these companies are saying they get more lawsuits and more risk coming from those traditional discrimination plaintiffs than the reverse discrimination plaintiffs. And I hear that, again anecdotally, when we speak with general counsel within these organizations.

You have to think of this as more of a balance. Yes, there are legal risks associated with doing some forms of DEI, but there are also legal risks associated with eliminating DEI.

What is the most important takeaway from the report?
It’s really summed up in the title of the report, “Risks of Retreat.” There has been so much attention on the risks of doing DEI over the last couple of years. There has been very little attention to the risks of not doing DEI or the risks of pulling back from DEI.

Our first takeaway in the report is: assess risk from all angles. And what we mean by that is, don’t just fixate on the risks that you’re seeing from some of the headlines around company X being sued, or an executive order out of the administration. Think about the risks coming from all directions, including the risks of traditional discrimination suits, the risks of employee morale going down, financial pressure, and so on. And it’s only by doing that holistic risk assessment that you can come up with a smart strategy.

This interview has been edited and condensed.