Finding a hill to DEI on
Well, what can I say? Despite all my best efforts, AI is still dominating the headlines. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that it’s in almost every story on every technology news site. But this week I’m going to focus on a different acronym: DEI.
For those of you who haven’t heard of it before, DEI stands for diversity, equity and inclusion. It’s a set of organisational frameworks that seek to promote the fair treatment and full participation of all people, particularly groups who have historically been underrepresented or subject to discrimination based on identity and disability (thanks Wikipedia).
DEI arises from ‘affirmative action’, a phrase that was often deliberately used as a slur to suggest a bias in favour of minorities rather than its core purpose which, as set out in an executive order signed by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, was “to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, colour, or national origin”.
You will have heard of DEI recently because US President Donald Trump and his administration are on a mission to eradicate it. From a tech point of view, broligarch Mark Zuckerberg recently ended several Meta programmes focused on hiring diverse candidates, including its equity and inclusion training programmes. This came after he stated in an interview with podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan that companies were becoming “culturally neutered” and needed more “masculine energy”.
According to NPR, Google, Amazon, Intel and Paypal are among the companies that have pared back, or removed entirely references to diversity, equity and inclusion in their 2024 annual reports to investors.
What bearing does this have on us here in Ireland and Europe, you might ask? I would argue more or less the same as it does with attempts by US companies to prevent the imposition of controls on AI (there really is no escaping it) and data protection, it creates an unwelcome imbalance between the US and Europe.
In all instances, the path pursued by the US is the one that should definitely be the one less travelled.
Homefront on the culture war
But what it does mean is that European and Irish subsidiaries of US companies will frequently find themselves espousing and supporting values that their parent companies do not. So what, you might say, but there is a cause for concern here.
If businesses and corporate entities in Ireland and Europe employ and hire people on the basis of equality, that means the person who gets the position has not been employed because of the colour of their skin or the people that they know. To go back to JFK’s executive order, “applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, colour, or national origin”.
This is no longer true for the US and those companies that have dumped their commitment to equity and inclusivity. The path has been cleared, yet again, for mediocre white men (because it’s nearly always men) to advance at the expense of equally qualified (frequently more qualified) women, people with a different skin colour, sexual orientation, or nationality.
In the tech world, this is particularly unwelcome because it’s pale and male enough as it is. The fact that some of the richest and most high-profile leaders of the tech world in the US have endorsed the elimination of DEI speaks to something very unpleasant about the culture at the top of the IT industry on the other side of the Atlantic.
What will that mean for subsidiaries in Europe and Ireland if they show no desire to culturally regress to the 1950s? If the US continues down its current path, there will quite clearly be a divergence of values between the US and Europe. That divergence will be most marked in terms of regulation over the safety of AI and data protection, but it will also be reflected in the mindset of those leading US companies and the culture of those businesses compared to their European counterparts.
In the New America, DEI may well come to stand for Divergence, Entropy and Isolation.
Subscribers 0
Fans 0
Followers 0
Followers