Florida’s DEI Bill Shows The Problem With Focusing On How People Feel

The recent backlash against DEI suggests that the flurry of DEI activity of the past several years—and in particular the two years following the murder of George Floyd—has led to growing frustration among people, especially those who identify as white and male. What began a few months ago as individual complaints about the unfairness of DEI initiatives has now turned into a public attack on everything DEI. The recent legislation passed by Governor DeSantis banning DEI initiatives at public colleges in Florida shows the depth of resentment toward DEI: during a news conference in which he announced the passing of the bill, DeSantis stated that “DEI is better viewed as standing for discrimination, exclusion and indoctrination.”

It would be easy to dismiss these reactions as “haters being haters” and to chalk them up to widespread racism and bigotry, but doing so would avoid facing the reality that we, as DEI practitioners and supporters of DEI, have made some mistakes. Arguing that the business case for DEI has been proven but that white men just don’t get it, or that we should focus on less controversial terms like “belonging” because some people are stuck in a zero-sum mindset, are excuses that prevent us from understanding what has gone wrong, so that we may learn how to do things better.

In recent posts I have argued that the narrow focus on diversity levels (i.e., representation) as the sole metric of DEI progress is a bad idea that leads to complaints of reverse discrimination. An additional problem in DEI is that, when talking about inclusion, the focus is almost invariably on people’s feelings, rather than on the tangible day-to-day experiences that lead to those feelings. This is problematic because the way someone feels is the result of everything that happens to them. In other words, one’s feelings toward their workplace are the outcome, not the cause. But knowing an outcome without understanding the cause is not very useful. To clarify, let’s consider a simple analogy.

Imagine you wake up one morning with a sharp pain in your elbow. Because it’s interfering with your ability to write and type, you decide to go see a doctor. When you arrive, the doctor asks “on a scale of one to ten, how much pain do you feel?” You answer “five,” the doctor suggests you take 400mg of ibuprofen, and off you go.

That same morning, someone else wakes up with a sharp pain in her chest. She goes to see the same doctor, who asks the same question: “on a scale of one to ten, how much pain do you feel?” When she answers “eight,” the doctor suggests she take 800mg of ibuprofen, and sends her off.

Would you consider this doctor competent and effective? Would you give this doctor a high rating? Would you feel confident about this doctor’s ability to heal people?

Sadly, this is essentially how most organizations explore workplace inclusion and belonging. But just as someone’s overall level of pain tells you virtually nothing about the underlying disease or how to cure it, someone’s overall feeling of inclusion and belonging tells you virtually nothing about why they feel that way, or what can be done about it.

An even less useful, but surprisingly common practice, is to ask questions along the lines of “do you feel that your organization is inclusive” or “do you believe that your organization supports DEI initiatives?” Going back to the medical analogy, this would be akin to the same doctor asking you whether you felt that his hospital as a whole did a good job of reducing pain—or whether you thought that the hospital was making good investments in medical equipment—and then trying to cure you of your ailments based on your answers.

Asking people about their feelings is not useful because one’s feelings are the result of everything that happens to them in the workplace, from daily microagressions to long-term disappointments of lackluster compensation and slow career advancement. Furthermore, using data about people’s negative feelings to motivate action is counterproductive as it makes people defensive and does not offer tangible advice for improvement.

A better way to make tangible progress in DEI is to focus on the workplace experiences that cause people to feel excluded. These experiences tend to fall into two broad buckets: those that result from interactions with people, and those that result from interactions with workplace policies, processes and systems. In this light, we can define inclusion as a measure of what people do (that is, how they behave) in an organization, and we can define equity as a measure of how different people are impacted by policies, processes and systems that exist in the organization.

Focusing on tangible, measurable definitions of inclusion and equity will make it much easier to pinpoint the root causes of negative individual feelings (i.e., sense of belonging), and overall negative outcomes in retention and representation (i.e., diversity).