DEI industry turns to ‘safer’ topics

SCORNED BY THE WHITE HOUSE

Joelle Emerson, the chief executive of the DEI consultancy Paradigm, in Menlo Park, Calif., on July 2. To avoid the Trump administration’s scrutiny, companies are asking for fewer trainings focused on race and gender and more on neurodivergence and generational differences. LOREN ELLIOTT — THE NEW YORK TIMES

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By Niko Gallogly

The New York Times

When President Donald Trump signed an executive order in January targeting diversity, equity and inclusion programs in federal agencies, schools and the private sector, Arin Reeves, who has been a DEI consultant for 26 years, said many in her field were in a panic.

“All the federal government stuff, I was watching it, and I genuinely didn’t even know where to go with it,” Reeves said. For those in the industry, she added, there was a feeling of: “What do we do?”

The answer for many DEI professionals has been to adapt to what companies feel comfortable offering: employee trainings that maintain the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion but without necessarily calling them that. That has meant fewer sessions that focus explicitly on race, gender, sexuality and unconscious bias, and more on subjects like neurodivergence, mental health and generational differences, a training that teaches about how age affects viewpoints in the workplace.

Companies are looking for “safer inclusion topics,” said Reeves, who is based in Chicago and whose work involves conducting research on diversity in the workplace to inform her trainings. “If you have something being billed as a generational differences training, it is less likely to raise eyebrows among anybody that’s looking to say: ‘Hey, is that safe? Is that dangerous for us to do right now?’”

A report by the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at NYU Law and the workplace gender equity firm Catalyst found that 78% of C-suite executives intend to rebrand their DEI programs with terms like “employee engagement” or “workplace culture” while staying committed to underlying values of inclusion.

“They still want to have these human-centered conversations,” said Stephanie Creary, an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School who focuses on organizational DEI. “And so as a substitute, they are talking about generations” and other less scrutinized topics.

Jessica Lambrecht, the CEO and a co-founder of the Rise Journey, a consulting firm that hires contractors for DEI training, said she, too, had adapted to increased demand in the past year for workplace trainings on mental health, generational differences, parental issues, and how to give and receive feedback. If a client requests a training on something Rise doesn’t offer, Lambrecht said, she quickly finds the right expert to do it.

That flexibility, she said, has helped offset a drop in business from a peak in 2022, when companies across the country increased investment in DEI initiatives.

Big companies including Meta, Target, Lowe’s and Amazon have all publicly scaled back or eliminated their DEI programs in the last year. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company was committed to building a diverse and inclusive company and that it had recently started an employee development program that included training on topics like wellness. Meta declined to comment on changes to its DEI programs, and Lowe’s and Target did not respond to requests for comment.

Americans are deeply split over DEI in the workplace, with a recent NBC poll showing that 49% thought such programs should be eliminated because they created divisions.

Creary thinks some of the blame for that falls on corporations that “unilaterally decided to focus only on race and gender” and created the impression that the field was intended to benefit only certain identity groups.

Other professionals agree that broadening the scope of DEI could help fix what they think went wrong in the field over the last few years. “This should have never been work that was niche or felt like it was siloed” to specific groups, said Joelle Emerson, CEO of the DEI consultancy Paradigm, who has also seen rising demand for trainings on topics like neurodiversity and generational differences.

Emerson said she hoped that by focusing on a wider range of identity groups, the DEI field would “generate broader buy-in” from people “who might not have felt seen in this work before.” But she added that Paradigm had continued to incorporate race and gender into its trainings.

Not all consultants have been able to navigate the shift to less divisive topics.

Ruchika Malhotra, a DEI professional in Seattle, has seen an 80% drop in business inquiries from last year, which has forced her to dip into her savings. As a woman of color, Malhotra thinks that companies are less willing to hire her even for topics like leadership training because they fear she will be perceived as someone who will focus on race and gender.

“Often your identity itself seems to be the blocker or the barrier for organizations to want to engage with you in this climate,” she said.

That fear of explicit conversations surrounding race and gender is worrisome to David Glasgow, executive director of the diversity and inclusion center at NYU Law. “The problems relating to race and gender in the workplace haven’t gone away,” he said. “It feels a lot like sweeping it under the rug.”