DEI Destroys Organizational Justice

And how DEI has led consulting giant McKinsey & Company and pharmaceutical titan Novartis to engage in illegal and unjust discrimination policies.

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Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

“Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” initiatives claim to care about compassion, tolerance, and fairness, but they actually violate all 4 types of organizational justice, which in turn violates social justice, undermining the expressed purpose of DEI initiatives.

Let’s start with distributive justice.

As Jerald Greenberg writes in Organizational Justice: the Dynamics of Fairness in the Workplace, distributive justice involves “people’s perceptions of the fairness of distributions of rewards or resources of some type,” including hiring and promotions. Distributive justice is positively correlated with how satisfied employees are with workplace outcomes, how satisfied they are in general, how committed they are to the company, how much they trust the company, and how much they engage in organizational citizenship behaviors.

Distributive justice is also correlated with fewer negative reactions among employees, and less withdrawal (i.e., becoming disengaged, avoiding work, quitting).

DEI initiatives destroy distributive justice. By advocating for hiring and promotion based on surface-level characteristics like race, gender, sexuality, gender identity, or other immutable qualities, DEI undermines or outright obliterates the fair, impartial distribution of rewards. By creating “employee resource groups,” which segregate employees based on qualities like race, gender, and ethnicity and give them access to special trainings, conferences, and opportunities, DEI corrupts the fair distribution of resources.

Worse, DEI often doesn’t base these unjust distributions on their employees’ individual needs, they base them on racial or gender stereotypes. For example, rather than creating a series of trainings on financial management open to all employees, a company may provide this series of trainings to a Black-only “employee resource group” under the condescending and erroneous assumption that Black people are worse at financial management than other races and therefore need an unfair distribution of resources to get ahead.

If Black people truly have more to learn about financial management than other races – a stance I don’t agree with – then Black employees who attend non-segregated financial management training would still disproportionately benefit, and no one would be excluded. This would make such trainings truly diverse, equitable, and inclusive. Unfortunately, DEI is about as concerned with diversity, equity, and inclusivity as Orwell’s Ministry of Love was concerned about love.

DEI initiatives also violate equity, which is one of the most popular conceptualizations of distributive justice and, ironically, one third of DEI.

Equity theory proposes that people compare themselves with others based on inputs and outcomes.

“Outcomes refer to what people get out of their jobs, such as pay, fringe benefits, the bestowal of status, or any rewards intrinsic to the job itself,” Greenberg writes. “Inputs, by contrast, are peoples’ contributions to jobs, such as the quantity and quality of goods or services produced, work experience, and effort expended.”

You might notice that this definition of equity doesn’t mention race or gender. That’s because, despite the way many DEI activists and consultants treat it, true equity is the fair allotment of rewards and responsibilities based on merit, not forced or coerced outcomes based on immutable surface-level characteristics.

True equity is impartial, free from bias and favoritism. That includes freedom from the biases and discrimination of neoracist “anti-racists” as well as the traditional biases that pervaded America before the Civil Rights Movement.

A truly equitable system not only benefits the individuals who stand to gain from demonstrating their competence, which of course includes minorities, it also benefits society. Competent people improve existing social systems to create more reliable, beneficial productivity. Incompetent people, on the other hand, destroy beneficial systems and cause unnecessary chaos and suffering. Imagine hiring an incompetent hospital administrator. What effect would this have on the functioning and morale of doctors, nurses, and staff? What effect would this have on the patients? What effect would this have on the patients’ families and loved ones? Incompetence has a trickledown effect that spreads chaos to everything below it.

It is not fair or beneficial to hire or promote someone based on qualities that don’t pertain to the competency of the job. It is not fair or beneficial to the organization. It is not fair or beneficial to society. And yet this is exactly what diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives do.

For example, multinational consulting firm McKinsey & Company promises to “double Black leadership and hiring of Black colleagues.” This is a blatant admission of hiring and promotion based on race, not merit. McKinsey also “hosts training workshops for Black colleagues, ensuring they have the opportunity to grow and step into leadership positions at the firm.” They also organize annual conferences to “foster both peer and mentoring relationships within the Black community at McKinsey.”

Not only is this highly unethical, it also goes against McKinsey’s black employees’ expressed values.

In a video titled McKinsey Black Network, Shelly, a black man and Partner at the firm, says, “The most important thing at McKinsey is intellectual curiosity, a willingness to work hard, a client-service mindset, and the ability to work effectively on a team.”