Exploring the Societal Shifts Toward Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

According to Professor Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., Academic Director in the Leading Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion online short course from the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, there’s no doubt that DEI delivers a great deal of value for organizations. However, benefits such as improved performance, greater employee retention, and a more effective workforce aren’t the only advantages. DEI also has the ability to influence brand perception, as it continues to evolve as a priority for consumers and society.

Transcript

The focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion in American workplaces began in the 1960s as the leaders of the African American civil rights movement and the women’s rights movement began to demand greater access to and more equitable treatment from sectors of the society that had formally excluded them through discriminatory policies for decades.

At the height of these movements, the management ranks of the 500 largest firms in the United States were 100 percent white and male. The demographics in other elite sectors, like universities, were not much better. When the social movements for racial and gender equality pushed the United States Congress to ban discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, it created new imperatives for businesses and universities to open their ranks to ethnic and racial minorities and women for the first time. The concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion emerged as politicized terms in Western democracies during these struggles for change.

The drive towards diversity, equity, and inclusion

The social movements of the 1960s marched in the streets for racial, gender, and LGBTQ+ equality, not diversity, equity, and inclusion. The terms diversity, equity, and inclusion have emerged as Western governments have set the standards for doing the work of promoting equality for the formerly marginalized groups. For example, the term diversity emerged as the main concept in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space in 1978, when Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell wrote in the Bakke versus University of California Regents case that the UC Davis medical school could use race-based admissions to ensure a diverse medical school class. In that same case, however, Justice Powell ruled that racial quotas were not permissible because they violated American notions of equitable treatment. 

Justice Powell’s ruling in the Bakke case was predicated on two arguments. First, the idea that all white and all male organizations were inherently illegitimate in a diverse society like the United States. The second argument, drawn from an amicus brief supplied by Harvard University, was that racial diversity improved the learning environment for all students at elite universities.

How this applies to your organization

This argument has been transposed to the business sector, through social science research that has demonstrated that diverse teams lead to better decision-making within business contexts. There’s also growing evidence that companies with diversity in the leadership ranks are more profitable. These findings are the foundation of what we call the business case for diversity, equity, and inclusion.