The cloud of the sputtering economy has at least one silver lining: Technology companies, among the biggest proponents of the diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) scam, are being forced to slash their divisive, dollar-draining DEI departments.
“The layoffs sweeping the technology industry are gutting diversity and inclusion departments, threatening company pledges to boost underrepresented groups in their ranks and leadership,” reports Bloomberg.
For example:
At Twitter, the diversity, equity and inclusion team is down to just two people from 30, one former employee said. A DEI worker who was let go from a popular ride-share company said their job search has stalled as other technology companies assess their finances. And just before getting the axe at separate tech giants this fall, two DEI specialists said leadership had stopped setting long-term goals for their departments entirely.
DEI job listings fell 19 percent last year; only software engineering and data science postings declined more.
In better economic times, companies could afford to spend buckets of cash trying to prove their woke bona fides. Bloomberg notes:
Recent years have seen a diversity and inclusion hiring boom. After Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, organizations of all stripes made promises to boost gender and racial diversity in their ranks. Dozens brought in their first ever Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officers. In the three months after George Floyd’s murder, DEI job postings jumped 123 per cent, according to data from jobs site Indeed.
Now, with profits shrinking, businesses must concentrate on their core mission; they can’t afford to waste resources on progressive pipe dreams. Thus, bye-bye, DEI.
Bloomberg, of course, frets about this turn of events:
“Cutting DEI oriented staff now, unless you’ve made really progress [sic] and can say ‘mission accomplished’ is not a good look,” said Angie Kamath, dean at the NYU School of Professional Studies, who focuses on workforce development. “There are some real risks.”
In some cases, companies might even backslide, said Monne Williams, an Atlanta-based partner at McKinsey & Company.
Brooks Scott, founder and CEO of executive coaching firm Merging Path Coaching, told Bloomberg a major problem is “that companies tend to lean on a ‘last in, first out’ approach to layoffs” — which means all those new DEI hires are the first to go. Then, giving away the game, Scott “said companies should consider race, gender and ethnicity when deciding who [sic] to let go.”
In other words, DEI is all about treating people on the basis of their skin color and whichever of the infinite number of genders they claim to be at any given moment. It leaves no room for individuality, particularly when it comes to viewpoints.
Case in point: Daily Caller’s Kay Smythe recalled that, having “worked with a few diversity and inclusion (or ‘unconscious bias’) companies,” she “was offered a significant position” at one. “I would have been the only immigrant on the team at the time, and had long conversations with the CEO about how to mitigate the mistakes of its competitors,” she wrote. “My offer was rescinded after the CEO read my Twitter. He wanted people of different colors, not of different mindsets and beliefs.”
Smythe’s experiences with DEI firms led her to conclude that they are “one of the most racist, antagonistic, borderline-scam concepts I’ve ever witnessed.”
Even if DEI weren’t a fraud, would Amazon’s having hired 10,000 black employees — or even made a black woman its CEO — prior to 2020 have done anything to prevent the BLM riots? To ask the question is to answer it.
When (if?) the economy finally recovers and companies can once again afford to indulge their leaders’ DEI fetishes, one hopes they will instead heed these words of wisdom from Heather Mac Donald, author of the New York Times bestseller The Diversity Delusion: “Corporate diversity education introduces divisions where none exist. It teaches employees to think of themselves in opposing groups and distracts from the mission of a business, which is to create a product or service as efficiently as possible to meet a market demand.”
