Questioning Diversity & Inclusion

Corporate diversity and inclusion (D&I) advisors and strategists feed into the system that oppresses the marginalised groups they seek to support. Why do I think this? It comes down to one premise: society as we know it is inherently racist, sexist, ableist, heteronormative, ageist and oppressive in countless other ways. The “inclusion” part of D&I, thus, means that we are asking those who are oppressed to participate in the machine that oppresses them in the first place. The argument is as follows:

1. D&I initiatives seek to include people from marginalised backgrounds in aspects of society that usually elude them, and
2. Society as we know it is inherently oppressive;
3. Therefore, D&I initiatives seek to include people in activities of an oppressive society.
4. Oppression is outright evil.
5. Therefore, D&I is bad.

Going forward, I will speak of D&I initiatives to refer to policies, strategies and activities of all sorts that are designed with some form of D&I in mind. D&I is to be understood in a broad sense. This is because both terms diversity and inclusion (as well as other terms used in D&I, such as equality, fairness and equity) are complex and worthy of their own lengthy discussions. If anything, we can take the subject of study of this piece to be inclusion. After all, it is inclusion what is specifically being questioned in the argument outlined above.

To this effect, let us narrow our definition of D&I initiatives to be those that seek to increase the representation of traditionally marginalised groups in social activities that are usually closed to such groups. These social activities can be varied, from regarding access to education, to access to health services, to better job opportunities and so on. For example, consider schools offering free meals to children from poorer households, free healthcare or workplace D&I initiatives that aim at attracting women to an otherwise male-dominated workforce. Marginalised communities are then to be taken as those formed by people who, based on irrelevant features such as nationality, class, ethnicity, gender or sexual orientation, are treated disadvantageously.

I shall narrow the scope of D&I one step further by focusing specifically on workplace initiatives. Furthermore, I take such initiatives to have two distinct objectives, which I will respectively call the positive objective and the critical objective. On the one hand, by its positive objective, D&I seeks to celebrate its very namesake (diversity and inclusion). This means highlighting the benefits of having diverse workforces (in terms of age, social background, etc.), as well as empowering the voices of marginalised groups amongst the workforce. On the other hand, D&I’s critical objective seeks to tackle oppression and bring to light traditional and unjust power dynamics. This is the not-so-pretty side of D&I which I contend mostly lacks in practice. We can anecdotally depict this with a quick image search online for “diversity and inclusion”. What one finds is colourful, pleasing images that seem to ignore the underlying societal injustices that make D&I initiatives so necessary throughout businesses, whether in terms of recruitment, product and service design, supply chain management, and so on. Having defined D&I, we can begin to scrutinise the above argument.

D&I initiatives in the workplace seek to include people from marginalised backgrounds in aspects of society that usually elude them

I take the above definition of D&I to imply this premise. To some extent, my argument is circular: D&I is bad and therefore it is bad. To avoid having this premise dismissed as circular, I have given the above definition of D&I initiatives as those that (a) celebrate diversity and (b) fight inequalities. Given this definition, D&I is not inherently evil; it is its lack of self-reflection that ultimately turns out to be ethically questionable. This first premise, thus, relies on my definition of D&I, but it is worth expanding on for clarity.

D&I is not inherently evil; it is its lack of self-reflection that ultimately turns out to be ethically questionable

What do D&I initiatives in the workplace strive for exactly? It would be an interesting research project: to carry out a meta-analysis of all the thousands of D&I statements that scatter the corporate world to find out what they are all about. But in its ordinary sense, D&I is all about increasing diversity in the workplace. Many times, the case for D&I will be made in terms of profit. There is plenty of research out there hypothesising that diversity is profitable and researching the link between D&I and profit margins. The case of D&I is, in these instances, made as a business case: diversity is not worthy as a goal in itself, but for the purpose of making money. Alternatively, diversity can be taken to be the end goal when corporate functions within the business — most likely HR — gather and analyse data about staff member’s protected characteristics; for instance, given some benchmark, do we have enough females and black people? A similar line of thought may lead organisations to implement quotas (e.g.: a given department must at all times have a proportion of 40% males and 40% females). Diversity can be valued for other reasons; for example, epistemic diversity is intended to arm an organisation with different understandings and worldviews — these, in turn, help generate better ideas. Inclusion is then measured not in terms of recruitment, but retention: it takes an inclusive culture to make diverse voices and backgrounds feel equally valued and respected. As the old adage goes: diversity is about inviting everybody to the party, inclusion is getting everybody to dance.

The preceding paragraph elaborates the positive objective of D&I: to celebrate diversity. Whilst it can be questioned whether it even makes sense to value diversity qua diversity, or value it in terms of something else (e.g.: profit margins), I take D&I initiatives to generally focus on the positives and, to some extent, do so relatively well (maybe). However, the celebration of diversity misses the crux of the problem: we live in an unjust world. We will elaborate on this when discussing premise (2). For now, I wish to note simply that D&I initiatives in the workplace are deemed positive for their being a response to social inequalities. When we ask “why do we need D&I?”, the response is not automatically “to make more money” or “because it is epistemically useful” (very few people speak of epistemically anything, really). When we respond to that question, we think “because it is only fair”. We consider some underlying raison d’être for D&I. We reflect on what D&I actually means and realise that it is a response to an otherwise unjust world. “Why is everybody at work white?” “Why are all my colleagues male?” “How come we all have master’s degrees?” But it is easy to miss the point here too: one can continue this line of thought and return to the positive definition of D&I (“given that we’re all guys in product development, it would be good to hire a woman to be more considerate of our female customers when brainstorming”). It will take even further reflection to turn around and say, for example, “oh, we all have higher education degrees — what about people without?” Or “huh, maybe people who are not white struggle to get the kind of jobs we have”. A further thought is: “are we alienating them?” Once again, we are at a fork in the road: “is it us, a heteronormative, homogeneous, white-male-dominated team, who alienate them (most of the world’s population), or is this a problem beyond our control?” I believe D&I initiatives, if anything, empower an organisation to think along the lines of the first option: the organisation has a problem and must figure out how to make its workforce more diverse. But the second option remains; indeed, there is a much larger issue athand: systemic oppression.

Society as we know it is inherently oppressive

It is hard, if at all possible, to speak of society at large without getting something wrong — as if one could even fathom generalisable sociological laws. With this in mind, I write this section in broad terms, vague enough not to make any categorically false claims, but applicable to one roughly defined society alone: Western capitalism. I am taking Western capitalism to be built on the ideal of private property. What it means for society to be capitalist is an endless debate, thus I make this simplification: that the greater one’s private property and cumulated wealth, the greater one’s power in this world. What’s more, this seemingly unalienable right to possession is what makes ours a capitalist society.

There is an important role to be played by history in this definition: wealth is inherited, passed on from generation to generation. The descendants of yesteryear’s slave traders are in possession of greater power than those descending from enslaved families — because one’s right to private property is paramount. Values are also long-lived: we are still in a heteronormative world, where being gay, lesbian, asexual or bisexual means needing to find your own communities for support and understanding. In line with the capitalist ideal, it is the more “able” people who are worth engaging with and exploiting for increased returns: disability at large and reasonable adjustments1 in particular are deemed costly and inefficient. One’s gender and sex can also be used to judge one’s capacity to perform in a certain job or work environment. One’s age, also. And the list goes on.

These are all irrelevant features when judging people in the workplace in particular: so what if the person with mobility issues writes reports slower than his counterpart? So what if a woman joins and there is a chance she decides to become a mother and takes maternity leave some time in the future? How does anybody relate somebody’s race, accent or primary school with their intellect? And why must everybody be judged, ultimately, in terms of how much money they can generate? This very notion, of reducing people’s identities to their profitability, is concerning. What’s more, to use irrelevant features to make these judgements is simply wrong. Of course, identity is a highly complex concept. It has been studied by many a philosopher. But this reductionist account, whereby one is evaluated on the basis of their financial potential, is deeply unsettling. The very idea of assigning value to lives in monetary terms (or any terms!) is already questionable! How have we allowed ourselves to be part of a system that has this ideal at heart?

Why must everybody be judged, ultimately, in terms of how much money they can generate?

We are all human beings and, as such, deserve the same levels of dignity and respect we impart upon others, regardless of features that make us superficially different. Unfortunately, the existence of this thought in my mind and my wanting to share it is evidence for my having witnessed some perturbed society that needs reminding all forms of oppression are wrong. These are, however, the result of the capitalist system wherein we operate and think.

Therefore, D&I initiatives seek to include people into activities of an oppressive society

This intermediary conclusion follows from premises (1) and (2). If society is oppressive and D&I makes social activities readily available to more people, then D&I helps include people in activities that sustain our oppressive society. What matters here is the questioning of inclusion. What does it mean to include people? What are people being included in? Once again, I take on this section by referring to D&I’s two objectives: the positive and the critical.

By D&I’s positive objective, we are referring to its celebration of diversity, of the potential of teams with members of different backgrounds, of the uniqueness and richness of different cultures and understandings of the world. Inclusion here refers to respecting each voice equally. It is more specifically about empowering the voices of those of marginalised backgrounds. These voices can be strengthened through fair internal procedures: by assessing people equally for potential promotions, offering professional development opportunities to all, even applying affirmative action to such decisions. Inclusion is about making office spaces accessible, toilets non-gendered, job titles and job descriptions realistic and non-exclusive, salaries transparent and linked only to relevant factors. Actions are clear and definable by this definition of D&I. Debates amongst D&I professionals and the executives who seek to implement their initiatives usually pivot around this understanding of inclusion.

This changes quite a bit when we consider the critical objective of D&I. To revisit it briefly, the point of this objective is to question why D&I is necessary in the first place and critique the society that brings this need about. Through this lens, one may ask what are we including people in. What we are including people in are obviously jobs and opportunities to take part in the economy. But isn’t this the problem? Isn’t the economy, the capitalist system, the mechanism that sustains the oppressive machine? Is D&I giving the oppressed the chance to take part in activities that reinforce oppression? And as D&I can only help include so many people, do the few marginalised people who manage to be included end up harming the large majority of their communities and peers? I cannot help but feel that the answer is “yes.”

We will visit limitations to this thesis later on, but I have just spoken of one pertaining to communities or having peers. This is shorthand for something much more complex. The idea that one person from, say, the “BAME” community must feel part of such a diverse community is doubtful. The question is of the following form: to what extent must the black Caribbean person relate on the basis of race with the Southeast Asian person? Another such conglomerate of diverse individuals is the LGBT+ community, which intertwines people both of different sexual orientations and people of different genders. And let us not get into what it means to have a medical condition: the variety is far too enormous. So how can I speak of communities and peers? I do so on two bases.

Firstly, there is a shared target: a heteronormative, ableist, white male-dominated society of power imbalances. A shared target is identifiable. To take advantage of the chances D&I offers is to become one with the target and leave behind the people who suffer some form of oppression. I am not arguing for a separatist notion of oppressed communities which, after all, may have little to do with each other; what I am saying is that the oppressed share this facet in their lives: there is a sense in which one can leave their peers and communities behind (of course, it is not the fault of the oppressed that the D&I initiative grants only a handful of individuals better opportunities!).

Secondly, and deriving from the idea of people sharing in some form of oppression, I take it that a sense of solidarity is in order. Of course, one cannot understand the precise form that disadvantage takes in each other person’s life, but one can empathise with the notion of other people in similarly oppressed communities. This solidarity can extend even from people who are not part of oppressed communities. The white heterosexual male is capable, after all, of educating himself to understand the social injustices prevailing throughout the west. — and, in doing so, empathising with oppressed communities and acting accordingly (whether that means donating to charity, taking part in marches or influencing their networks, that is for him to decide). This ultimately comes down to education and reflection: empathising with oppressed communities and acting accordingly means being aware of such oppression.

Oppression is outright evil

I assume that anybody reading this agrees with this assertion. Moreover, I assume that D&I professionals across the board would agree with this point. I am not one for universal claims, but most probably everyone agrees that oppression is bad by definition. Let us move swiftly onto the conclusion.

Therefore, D&I strategies are bad

This is by no means an obvious claim, and may be too bravely worded to follow from the above premises. Ultimately, it relies heavily on a definition of D&I that does not question the status quo, but simply hands over the baton of social injustice to a few select members of the marginalised communities that are hit worse by the power structures that prevail.

For clarity, let us briefly reconstruct the argument. Firstly, in practice, D&I initiatives in the workplace are limited in scope, simply going about the business of giving marginalised communities access to job opportunities. Secondly, these opportunities are the jobs that uphold the oppressive power dynamics of western capitalist society. Finally, given that oppression is bad, D&I is bad. This may be worded in sensationalist terms for the purpose of attracting people to at least consider the argument. More accurately put, it is the unreflective form of corporate D&I initiatives what are up for debate here. D&I is not bad tout court: it is only bad in its current form.

It is not hard to see that the spread of D&I across organisations is a product of the system. It’s the invisible hand of the markets lending a sweetener to the oppressed to subdue their rightful calls for rebellion. At a corporation’s level, it amounts to whitewashing: having built itself on and profited from suppression, it considers itself to be doing a societal favour when it recruits people regardless of genitalia and skin colour.

An objection

Let us consider a potential objection to this argument: given the system we are in, D&I is a force for good. I do not deny that (some but not all) D&I professionals work in their field with a passion for values such as equality, transparency and fairness. I do not deny that these values are prima facie positive and that D&I professionals are, therefore, well-intending. I accept that the system of oppression around us is one that we are born into and one which we, as individuals, affect only slightly. To change the power structures at hand would require social movements far greater than any set of D&I initiatives can bring about. To this effect, it is no doubt true that they offer positive opportunities to individuals of marginalised communities. My contention is not so much that D&I initiatives are bad per se, but that they are poorly designed in light of a much broader system that needs changing. Indeed, D&I is a force for good given the system we are in — but why must it be taken as a given? Is D&I not designed to question the status quo and make things better?

Some applications of D&I might also weaken the objection. Consider the use of D&I as a marketing gimmick that only happens to help oppressed communities when recruitment practices are designed more fairly because of that campaign; D&I in this case no longer holds the intention to actually bring good about. The aforementioned case of linking D&I with better-performing teams also seems to value D&I for the wrong reasons. In this sense, the objection begs the question: D&I is assumed to be a force for good without having been clearly defined. The moment we learn of the different ways D&I is understood and applied, we can see that it is not always a force for good. The examples of D&I being a marketing gimmick or a way to improve team performance lack the intention of bringing about positive social change or breaking down unjust barriers. Scratching the surface of such cases, even only slightly, will reveal the same old power structures within the organisation.

So, what next?

There is something quite awkward about this conclusion: no solution seems to follow other than a radical role for D&I professionals, who should now question the system that made them. Like being between a rock and a hard place, D&I must continue treating people fairly but also fight the systemic oppression that allows their organisations to exist in the first place. To this effect, D&I must be much wider in remit. It is not enough to offer more roles to individuals from minorities, or somehow create more inclusive business cultures with written policies. At the heart of D&I is a fairer, more equitable society. In practice, D&I also means questioning supply chains, product development, marketing. This can be made possible by working with principles of corporate social responsibility (also oftentimes reduced to its own buzzword).

Philosophical reflection, critique and ethical considerations must be embedded into organisations at a much deeper level for D&I to make a meaningful impact. D&I should not be a buzzword, a PR gimmick, something to allocate a little budget to and wash one’s hands with. D&I can be part of a much larger movement whereby businesses become more ethical and, in doing so, put capitalism in a tight spot. By valuing not private property but some amalgam of fairness, equality, diversity, equity, inclusion, transparency and justice, D&I in particular and society at large can change for the better.

A special thanks to Sophy James for your feedback before I published this piece

This article originally appeared on the Philosophy for Business blog