Frank Dobbin
Appearances
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
A for accessibility covers people with disabilities. And I think the surprise to me is that in some of the recent pronouncements from the Trump administration, DEIA is mentioned specifically. A very large number of people with disabilities are veterans. And a lot of activities that we think of as DEI activities are connected to veterans.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So when Ron DeSantis closed DEI offices in the University of Florida system— and fired a bunch of people, he was firing a bunch of Veterans Affairs officers as well as people who we think of traditionally as DEI officers. So to me, it's kind of surprising.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
It would surprise me if there isn't some backlash within the right to try to turn back the challenge to accessibility since it covers so many veterans.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Well, so lots of training programs, pretty much every training program we look at helps to promote diversity if it's open to all employees. And increasingly, when firms put in training programs, they are open to all employees. For example, Walmart 10 years ago now put in a program to train all frontline workers online. And over the course of a couple of years, they trained everybody up.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And that clearly had an effect on the representation of people of color in their management ranks. Because it's not necessarily that their skills improved, but they also saw, hey, my employer is making a commitment to me. And since I've been trained, I'm more likely to get a promotion. So training of all sorts, even when it's not under the banner of DEI, is quite effective.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I would say in simple terms, DEI comes out of legislation trying to assure equality of opportunity that is having the same chances in the labor market by race, ethnicity, creed, starting in 1961, and then by gender as well, starting in 1964.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I mentioned mentoring programs before. When companies put in mentoring programs for everybody and ask everybody, please sign up to get a mentor voluntarily. Please sign up to be a mentor. It has very significant positive effects on the retention of women and people of color. And so we see for white women,
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Black men and women, Hispanic men and women, Asian men and women, we see significant increases in their representation in firms and in management after a mentoring program goes into effect. I'll say just maybe two more things. Recruiting more broadly. So a lot of organizations...
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
in the last seven or eight years have recruited very broadly because we've had a tight labor market except for a couple of months during COVID. Employers are having trouble finding people to work. The national unemployment rate has been around 4%. In some labor markets, it's much tighter than that. Employers lose people for other jobs often, more often in the tight labor market.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So, more employers are recruiting more widely. So, if they used to go to, say, the colleges and high schools that their current staff graduated from, now they're going to all of the colleges and high schools in the area. And in many places, that means they're going to high schools in majority-minority neighborhoods. They're going to historically black colleges, to Hispanic-serving institutions.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
institutions that serve a lot of immigrants. And there again, the effect is pretty dramatic increases in the diversity of workers and eventually in the diversity of supervisors and managerial staff. So these are all things that employers can absolutely continue to do. And that's one
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I'm optimistic that employers that want to stay where they are in terms of diversity and see improvements can do it.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I mean, the beauty of mentoring programs is you don't get to choose who your protege is. So formal programs just assign you to somebody if you volunteer to be a mentor. And the great thing about that is that people who wouldn't necessarily have chosen a black woman, a white man executive who wouldn't necessarily have chosen a black woman, gets a black woman as his protege anyway.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And we know from lots of research from psychologists and sociologists that being in contact with somebody from another group is the best way to really fight individual level bias. It's much more effective to have a mentee from another group than it is to go to six diversity trainings for four hours a year. Those tend not to have any effect on what workforce diversity looks like.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Well, if you think about what implicit bias training is trying to do, just to take that part of diversity training to begin with, the goal is to make people aware of their own biases so that they will be able to interrupt their own thought processes and decision processes and rid the decisions of bias.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So they'll be able to step back and say, wait a minute, am I giving the black candidate a fair shot here? But when people are told that they are biased, and that's what implicit bias training does, it tells everybody that they're biased, they don't react positively. Nobody really reacts positively to being told they're biased.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And as a consequence, people often leave, and I'm thinking about white men in particular, people often leave feeling that they've been challenged, that they've been called a slur, a racist, or a sexist. And they often leave in a very kind of defensive manner, like feeling... they need to defend their own fairness.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So often people just leave the room antagonized or increasingly they're doing these online and they leave the session antagonized. And what we see in our research is that
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
That kind of training that's designed to convince people that they're biased and that then includes a legalistic component, which basically shows what kinds of judgments have been upheld against firms that were found in court to have... discriminated. So basically, here's the punishment your company might get for your biases.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
That kind of training with the one-two, you are biased and your company might be punished in court for it, actually leads to decreases in the diversity of firms after they put that kind of training in. And the disappointing thing is that's the most common kind of training out there, something like two-thirds, three-quarters of firms have that kind of training.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So it's not that there's no kind of training that works, but... For the most part, what companies are doing sort of backfires. And it's ironic because if you ask them why they do it, they'll say, we'll get into legal trouble if we don't do it, which isn't strictly true.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So before 1961, when John F. Kennedy issued an executive order requiring all firms with federal contracts and, by extension, all federal agencies to to practice what he called affirmative action, which means just taking positive steps to end the history of discrimination in employment.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Before that time, most employers, most private sector corporations, would not hire black men except for a certain number of jobs. So if we take the example of Lockheed's plant in Marietta, Georgia, which was a huge federal contractor building military airplanes. They would only hire black men for a few jobs, such as janitor and washroom attendant. They didn't recruit very broadly. for black men.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So I personally think that some companies will try to do it in stealth mode. And some companies weren't really that committed to it to begin with and may not mind dismantling parts of it. But for those that are committed, I personally think we need to wait to see what sticks of the many things the Trump administration has tried to do. And that might mean...
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
making yourself slightly open to, say, federal litigation, but it's just hard to see how Department of Justice or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission are going to get their act together quickly to, for example, go after companies that seem to have not abided by Trump's initial orders to cease all DEI activity.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
As somebody who's been studying this for more than 40 years now, we've had a lot of ups and downs. And, you know, I certainly studied the ups and downs of the civil rights movement. This looks like, although I said it's a pendulum before, but this looks like much more than the pendulum swing.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
It looks like an effort to really roll us back to a time before there were any protections for people of color, for women, for LGBTQ Americans, for Americans with disabilities. But I think it's important to remember that we've been here before. Ronald Reagan tried to do away with affirmative action and equal opportunity protections.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And his own lieutenant stopped him from doing it because, you know, in those days, Republicans as well as Democrats thought we had some work to do. And as I was saying earlier, I think— Perhaps even a bigger force in pushing America towards more equal opportunity is just the labor market because it's been so tight for seven or eight years.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Employers have really had to figure out how to do more with fewer people and how to upskill people, how to retain people, and how to give them the things that they need to stay around.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
They didn't allow black men to any other kind of job. And they didn't provide the kinds of training that they provided for white men to black men. So they didn't provide skills training so that they could move up within the workforce. So the 1961 Affirmative Action Order got Lockheed to really change their ways.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I think it's important to remember as well that in 1961, Jim Crow laws were still in effect in the South. enforcing segregation in housing, in employment, in education. And just because the North didn't have those laws didn't mean that there wasn't the same kind of employment discrimination that we saw in the South.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So most Northern employers weren't hiring black men for any but the lowest level jobs, weren't promoting them, weren't offering them skill development. So the world has changed a lot.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
In the 1970s, there were a number of reverse discrimination legal cases filed against private sector employers and against police and fire departments. And the courts never found any of these cases to have merit. So those cases disappeared in part because lawyers couldn't win them.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And so if you wanted to file a reverse discrimination court, you couldn't find a lawyer because lawyers in these tort cases work on commission, essentially. They take 30% of the proceeds if they win. So since then, it's been pretty much impossible to find a lawyer who will represent you in a reverse discrimination suit.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Another piece of evidence comes from social science researchers who try to see if there's discrimination either in favor of white people or in favor of non-white people. Typically, they're looking at white men versus black men and Hispanic men. And they send resumes of essentially identical people to employers, see if they get called back.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And sometimes they send actual job applicants to the same employers. And they have consistently found that white men are advantaged in all kinds of jobs. They have never found these studies that Hispanic men or black men are advantaged in getting any kind of job.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Well, I think there are two main things that have gone on over the last few years. One is that The economic situation of white working-class people, men and women, has deteriorated, and it's deteriorated over many years.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
So over the last 30 years, white, non-college-educated Americans, their relative income has declined compared to other groups, in particular compared to better-educated white Americans. And so that group of people... is feeling particularly beleaguered right now.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
And whenever the economy is in bad straits, it's relatively easy to get people to come out and identify a foe and essentially lay blame to some particular group. So I think what we're seeing here is that it's been very easy for people on the right to...
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
demonize immigrants and people of color as causing either problems in the American economy, in the case of people of color, and problems in the labor market, that is, they're stealing your jobs and eating your cats and dogs, in the case of immigrants.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
But also, we've seen that in the past, when civil rights groups get some wins, it often agitates white people who are on the right end of the spectrum. And so what we saw was, I think, the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement after the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And the response to that was... a very organized social movement, the reactivation of the Proud Boys.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
a lot of right-wing extremist groups, white nationalist groups, gained membership. And also, we saw some support from Trump and his allies for those groups. So, you know, I think the pendulum often swings back and forth when it comes to support for anti-DEI or anti-equality of opportunity groups and pro-DEI, pro-equality of opportunity groups.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
I do think that as you suggest, this is just a different moment.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Well, we know from the research on social movements and especially social movements targeting corporations that they are pretty effective. It's not really the economic pain that matters so much. It's the optics. It's what will this look like to our clients, to our potential investors. I think we're in an unusual moment now, though, where –
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
The person in charge of the country is siding with people who used to be considered fringe right-wing activists who are favoring white nationalism. So I do think that CEOs are going to struggle to figure out what the best – solution to this is. So some of this stuff, the right-wing activism, really started before Trump came to office.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
There were certain activists on the right, like Christopher Ruffo and Robbie Starbuck, who were coming out against big corporations that, for example, supported pride events or had public DEI announcements that were quite visible. And a bunch of companies between last June and the inauguration of Donald Trump did backtrack on things, and some of America's biggest employers backtracked on things.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
But the things they backtracked on were kind of low-hanging fruit, things that probably weren't affecting their workforces much.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Well, for example, they didn't get rid of mentoring programs which can be super effective at helping people of color and women to – stay in the workforce and to move up. But they got rid of, for example, internships targeting black Americans, usually college students, or they just opened them up to everybody. So, you know, that's something that's kind of not part of the main HR strategy.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
Some employers got rid of set-asides or preferences for, say, Use of women-owned businesses, women-owned suppliers or law firms and things like that. So they tended to get rid of things that specifically mentioned a group and not things that – were designed to just kind of open up the career system, like the skills training programs I mentioned.
Fresh Air
How Did DEI Become Part Of A Political Agenda — And A Slur?
A lot of employers help people of color to move up, just like they help working class white people to move up by offering apprenticeships and skills training. I didn't see those being closed down.