Why the post-2020 DEI boom was never going to last

If anyone could have predicted that the post-2020 focus on DEI would fade away, it was DEI practitioners.

DEI practitioners like Lily Zheng, fairness strategist and consultant. When Zheng started DEI consulting in the late 2010s, their work focused on helping companies move beyond one-off, 60-minute learning and development sessions and toward long-term DEI strategies. In their book, Fixing Fairness: 4 Tenets to Transform Diversity Backlash into Progress for Al, Zheng examines how companies can continue to invest in DEI, despite recent pushback.

Zheng sat down with HR Brew to talk more about their book and how DEI work has shifted over the last decade.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What will HR pros learn from your book?

This book is my answer to the question I’ve been hearing everywhere from leaders, in the last two years, of, what do we do now, if we care about our people, if we care about making the world a more diverse, equitable, inclusive place, but we feel stuck? Whether we’re feeling stuck from political tensions, whether our general counsel has told us we need to change some of the words we use, whether we’re getting pushback or confusion from our workers or our customers, what do we do?

When did you start working in DEI?

I first started doing what we call “DEI work,” what I’m now calling “fair work,” in probably the mid-2010s…doing very basic, humble one-on-one training content…How do we talk about race? How do we understand gender? How do we address discrimination?...A lot of work in the industry was focused on this one-on-one learning and development lens.

How has your DEI work changed over time?

[In the 2010s], it was still, by and large, seen as a nice-to-have…Maybe once or twice a year, we would go to this training, and learn a little bit, and get some professional development, and then go back to our jobs. So, I wouldn’t say interest in DEI at the time was very high.

The research, even at the time, in the mid-2010s, was telling me that the sorts of services that I was offering just didn’t work, like you can’t change a workplace culture with a 60-minute training. You can’t change rates of discrimination or the quality of employee experience with the 60-minute implicit bias training. That’s just not how it works.

Within a pretty short period of time, I decided that I wanted to be doing something different…So, I bet on myself, which was terrifying, and started a small business…I [didn’t] want to be doing training…I want to be doing longer-term systems change work within workplaces, rather than just these one-off trainings.

There was even less of a market for that…People kept saying, like, “Lily, why are you doing this? We don’t want that. We just want the training. We just want you to come in for 60 minutes, do a song and a dance, and we’ll pay you some money.” So, the first four or five years was really hard, and then I found my footing. Made it work out, and then the summer of 2020 happened.

How was DEI affected by that summer?

The summer of 2020 was this massive explosion in interest in DEI, but, as I write about in the book, I actually don’t think it was good for the industry…They were all interested in the quick, one-and-done, flashy, external-facing, change initiative that we knew at this point wouldn’t change anything…For me, as it turns out, work actually was worse during the summer of 2020, because the quality of the requests that I got dropped so much.

In 2019…it was really easy for me to pick good clients, and then, in 2020 I would get a dozen requests a day with at least 11 of them being really low quality, really performative, not being serious, not knowing what they wanted, and it wasted my time. It made it really hard for me, as a practitioner, to cut through the noise and actually do good work.

Now, the pendulum is flowing the other way, partially because of just how empty all that buzz was in 2020 and 2021. People got really tired of workplaces that didn’t actually care, saying, “Oh, we’re going to throw some money at the problem, and bring in some entertainers to do a song and a dance about how much we care about race”...Eventually workers were like, “We’re sick and tired of this. We’re still getting discriminated against…This isn’t serious.”

Now, I’m still doing the work that I’ve been doing the entire time…The sorts of clients that have been really invested in the long-term work, they haven’t gone anywhere…I’m still doing the same thing that I’ve been doing the entire time, even as, on the surface, there was this big swing toward DEI and then away from DEI.