Is the Government the Only Reason for DEI Workshops?

Email from an anonymous reader, reposted with his permission.

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By Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is surely “probably not, no.” But I do think government has likely played an underrated role in explosion of DEI workshops in private companies (an idea that Bryan discusses on the CSPI podcast here from 58:50 to 1:00:37). While there may not be laws mandating DEI workshops, such programs can develop as a natural response to hostile members of government.

To illustrate this, note that the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Diversity and Inclusion recently held a hearing to investigate an alleged lack of diversity and inclusion in the insurance industry outlined in their report entitled “Diversity and Inclusion: Holding America’s Largest Insurance Companies Accountable.” Among the charges was a lack of diversity in the insurance industry. In response, an industry representative defended insurance companies, noting among other things that “The average budget for diversity and inclusion increased 63%, $3M in 2017 to nearly $5 million in 2021.”

When lawmakers hold a hearing investigating you for a lack of diversity, and tell you that your behavior is “disappointing,” “troubling, to say the least,” “pathetic” and that “You gotta do better – all of the insurance companies,” that is an implicit threat of them interfering with you, as the title “Holding America’s Largest Insurance Companies Accountable” strongly implies, whether or not the threat is articulated. In fact, in the case of the hearing, the committee was explicit in considering new laws to further regulate DEI in the industry.

In such an environment, companies probably figure that spending a few million dollars hiring DEI staff to organize DEI training is a small price for multi-billion dollar companies to pay to mitigate the risk of costly litigation or other governmental interference. Certainly it is easier to spend a few million dollars on pointless lectures than to restructure your workforce of thousands of employees to match the current recommended racial guidelines.

This fear of governmental interference may partially explain not only the presence of DEI training in companies, but their increasing frequency. This may be a race between industries and within industries to avoid standing out as not diverse enough. The aforementioned congressional study, for example, found that “In 2021, the largest insurance companies had a lower percentage of employees of color (30.5%) compared to the largest banks (42%) and the largest investment firms (40.6%).” With Congress singling out companies or industries for special attention over DEI shortcomings, with the promise of “holding them accountable,” companies are incentivized to try to outrun their competition in the woke race so that they will be less likely to be gobbled by the pursuing government. That is, companies have DEI workshops so they’ll have something to spend a growing DEI budget on, so they can show that they're “improving,” and hopefully, just hopefully, doing enough to encourage the government to go pick on someone else.

One amusing anecdote from my personal DEI training in an insurance company that highlights the uselessness of DEI training at achieving anything other than DEI training, was a DEI speaker’s response to the question of what we as an insurance company could do to address the grievance he was discussing. In the course of hemming and hawing in corporatese, he mentioned that what the company could do was hold workshops like the one we were in.

As implied by title, however, government is probably not the only cause of the explosion of DEI workshops in companies. For example, not only can companies, and especially the staffers in their HR departments, genuinely feel that they are valuable (people do, after all, believe many strange things), the same reasoning of the workshops being a relatively inexpensive way of trying to stave off governmental retribution, can be applied to trying to avoid the retribution of woke mobs deciding you are bad and raising a hue and a cry against you.

However, even if government were the sole cause of DEI workshops in companies, I definitely don’t think that the solution to the problem is any sort of ban on such workshops or insistence that they not be mandatory for employees, in the spirit of some conservatives’ war against “woke capital.” Not every problem requires a legislative solution and not every solution is worthwhile. In this case, the government should just leave companies alone and stop intimidating them in the first place.

Incidentally, I think (with low confidence) that a useful criterion to differentiate "wokeism" from older political correctness, is the notion that those ideologies should affect everything in life and society. Under political correctness, there was stuff that was unacceptable to say (e.g. average members of different races differ in ways that affect outcomes), but what characterizes wokism is the idea that those ideologies need to shape everything we do as an insurance company. In this spirit, the aforementioned House subcommittee’s “recommendations” (recommendations as subtle as the mafia showing up to casually discuss your kneecaps) stated that “Though all insurance companies have a [sic] diversity and inclusion statement and policy... It is imperative that diversity and inclusion is [sic] integrated throughout the entire business function.”

I think a devotee of wokism would be challenged to name a single sphere of human activity in which wokism is not essential.