In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, chief diversity officer hires tripled among the largest publicly traded companies. American companies paid an estimated $3.4 billion to firms for diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, programs, according to Princeton professor Betsy Levy Paluck in an op-ed at the Washington Post.
And yet, moans Paluck, there is practically no research evaluating the results of these DEI initiatives.
DEI practitioner (and profiteer) Lily Zheng made a similar observation in a Harvard Business Review article earlier this month : “Despite the increase in organizations adopting DEI initiatives and the proliferation of DEI firms and practitioners, the big, poorly kept secret is that the majority of these initiatives are less effective than many make them out to be.” This, argues Zheng, is for two reasons. “On the one hand, there is a lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners. And on the other, organizations keep asking for, and funding, interventions that don’t work.”
Hellbound and Down 