A Lesson in DEI Failure From Britain

‘Diversity, equity and inclusion’ costs billions and doesn’t work.

WSJ editorial. 

"Memo to companies: Go ahead and cancel your DEI programs. That’s more or less the message of a recent report commissioned by the U.K. government finding that diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The report, presented to Business and Trade Secretary Kemi Badenoch by an independent panel, found there’s little evidence DEI efforts such as mandatory antibias training and corporate policy overhauls have any positive effect on corporate culture.

“Causality between interventions and outcomes is often near impossible to discern, even if positive correlations should be taken seriously,” the authors write. “Definitive claims of ‘what works’ can be misleading or inconclusive. Results in one context cannot necessarily be replicated in another as workplaces are complex social environments with countless variables.”

It’s hard to say what DEI even means: “The terms ‘diversity,’ ‘inclusion’ (and other associated terminology) are conceptually ambiguous, rapidly evolving, and often conflated,” the authors note. They point out that while the fad is to focus on diversity along racial, sex or other visible lines, “a visibly diverse organization is not necessarily meaningfully heterogenous.” Viewpoint diversity may be more important for a thriving company.

Despite this lack of results, DEI has become a huge and expensive business. U.S. companies spend some $8 billion a year on DEI training, the British report notes, and in the five years to 2020 the number of people with the job title “head of diversity” more than doubled on the professional networking site LinkedIn. U.K. taxpayers spend £557 million a year on 10,000 government jobs related to DEI.

A negative twist is that in the U.K. companies face growing risks of having to pay again for DEI as a legal backlash gathers momentum. Several employment-law cases have found that employers, including the government, violated British protections on freedom of belief by punishing employees who dissented from the DEI orthodoxy on race or transgenderism.

This is no way to run a company, a government or an economy—on either side of the Atlantic. Companies profit from diverse and inclusive workplaces, but that’s often the opposite of what DEI programs produce. Kudos to the British for starting to rethink this divisive politically motivated scheme."