In the blitzkreig of ‘initiatives’ where the new U.S administration, the engine of which has undoubtedly been tech billionaires such as Elon Musk and his brethren, has sought to erase any position, initiative or even accomplishment of any public servant considered to be the result of diversity, equity or inclusion (D.E.I), it has rightly not been the priority of the news cycle.
And while this does not deserve the same priority of focus as the possible restructuring of Western geopolitical alliances, it should not go unnoticed that making D.E.I a dirty word is part of the same spectrum of behaviour and politics, with its own not insignificant consequences.
The tech industry has had a long reputation for liberalism (although its debatable if that is earned).
The same companies who sought to provide such productivity ‘hacks’ as ping pong tables, remote work, and free meals to attract the best talent, at first thoroughly embraced, at least publicly, D.E.I.initiatives.
But as the tech industry grew, and platforms became more powerful, they were subjected to more legal, political and moral scrutiny, and there were moves to impose greater accountability and regulation to ensure public safety.
In what is a typical Newtons law response, the pendulum swung against these impositions, at first by rejecting any impositions they considered voluntary, ‘unnecessary’ or surplus to their capitalistic needs.
This is where D.E.I first started to feel its status as a ‘nice to have not a need to have’, particularly so during the layoffs of the tech correction in 2022. But this dovetailed with an earlier, broader, and slower burn movement in the industry which has centralised and vaulted the (mostly white, male, abled) entrepreneur, and where success was rewarded with not just capital success but power.
Mark Zuckerberg famously negotiated special voting rights at Facebook (now Meta) which means he can never be fired. More broadly his power rests in his platform’s control over the flow of information to billions of people, and even to sway elections, but with the protections of Section 230 which means he cannot be held responsible for anything published on his platform.
Lacking accountability
It’s about here where I think it makes sense to remind everyone that the hallmark of all dysfunctional systems is people in power without accountability.
In the historical telling of how the tech industry came to be so influential, the tech broligarchs of today see themselves as rebels, rule breakers or outliers, ‘running fast and breaking things’ and all the while contributing greatness (through their business) to the world via technology. In this way they also see themselves somewhat as philanthropists.
The rules shouldn’t apply to them (after all, if they followed the rules they wouldn’t be there) and they philosophically and more importantly intellectually, object to having others, particularly those they consider their intellectual inferior, place any imposts on them that might tell them how to run their businesses.
We have seen this influence escalate from their own businesses to the business of the people —the government.
Through DOGE, we have seen them ‘moving fast and breaking things’ in real time, a month in fact. First through the firing of high profile women or people of colour who were assumed to be ‘diversity hires’ within the public service.
Later, through the removal, reduction or de-resourcing of almost any federal government agency that was overseeing or regulating bigtech’s business interests such as the FAA, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Defense and others.
In this way, perhaps you can view the rejection of D.E.I as the low hanging fruit or leading indicator of a desire to avoid or indeed acknowledge any sort of impedement to being able to do whatever they want, or said another way, accountability.
Not that this is limited to the tech industry of course.
The normalisation of D.E.I initiatives since 1975 in Australia with the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, the passage of the Sex Discrimination Act in 1984, the Disability Discrimination Act in 1992 and the Age Discrimination Act in 2005, has meant that while ever so slowly, there has been a balancing of a more diverse workplace and with greater understanding of the benefits of this to the corporate landscape and to employees more broadly.
Do you think new dads would be entitled to parental leave today if women hadn’t joined the workforce and blazed the trail? However, there has also been a parallel slow burning resentment of the requirement to do so.
And now, the tech industry and its influence on the U.S. administration, have given companies tacit permission to reject these initiatives.
For example, since President Trump was elected and adopted the tech industry playbook, 20% of the Top 100 companies on the S & P have abandoned their D.E.I initiatives.
Closer to home, according to the AFR, only 4 of the ASX 20 in Australia will comment on their D.E.I commitments since Trumps election, on the record.
If you believe D.E.I initiatives allow you attract and retain the best people, and you think your people are central to your business success, you will keep them. If you don’t think that, you won’t.
DEI fatigue
If as an organisation you don’t support them, but won’t admit it, you obviously feel embarrassed to do so and perhaps that says more about the organisation than the decision to scrap D.E.I initiatives itself.
Which isn’t to say I don’t understand the fatigue for D.E.I. For example my own relationship with International Women’s Day over the years has been, let’s say….complicated.
Certainly it feels that we have moved on from the patronising cupcake morning teas organised by women, for women.
Where once again, not only do women bear the disproportionate burden of unpaid labour in their domestic and professional lives, when it comes to a day to recognising their contribution, they have to organise that too. And with almost a 100% women cohort, at times, it was hard not to be cynical that it was a performative, box ticking event that was preaching to the choir.
A week ahead of actual International Women’s Day, I attended probably the best IWD event I’ve ever been to. What made it so compelling was the calibre of the speakers who sought to illustrate why D.E.I is so critical (and there was not a cupcake in sight).
Notably, South Australia’s police commissioner Grant Stevens, spoke of how despite his best efforts to set a (internally, very unpopular) quota of recruits at 50% gender equity, over 10 years he hasn’t been able to achieve that. The reason the force internally objected to the quotas was a biased view of ‘merit’ and what a police officer needed to be to provide safety to the community.
A 2019 snapshot of US diversity. Photo: White House/Joyce N. Boghosian
Grant Stevens characterised this merit stereotype as a ‘bloke who was 6 foot 2 inches’, and his force feared employing more women police officers would make the community ‘less safe’.
An example of the reason why he sees diversity, equity and inclusion as important is because the rise in domestic violence reports has increased dramatically over the past decades— the result of education and awareness of course, but also the fact that the public today have confidence that the police force will take it seriously.
The greater employment of women — the predominant victims of domestic violence — as police officers is one significant reason the public have confidence the police force will take it seriously. And it’s worth stating, this is not a fringe issue — the Prime Minister has declared violence against women as a national emergency. Public safety is an issue for us all, not just a privileged cohort.
For the last few decades, the tech industry, to most people, represented productivity tools (ie computers, software), a bit of fun (gaming) or a platform for communication (social media, phones).
Today, what the tech billionaire CEOs need to grapple with has a lot more in common with Grant Stevens and the police force than one might think.
Gaming is highly addictive, causing social isolation and according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, it is contributing to young males withdrawal from the labour force.
Social media is now a sea of misinformation that is fomenting division, and remains one of the biggest contributors to child harm (through bullying, social anxiety isolation, depression and suicide and abuse).
That the executives of these platforms might not need to consider D.E.I in how their platforms affect their users, and how they run the business for the benefit of shareholders is not only hubris, it’s dangerous.
We are now seeing the new deeper technology revolution of artificial intelligence go through the same adoption arc as personal computers and the internet did in previous decades.
Given how dependent we will soon be on artificial intelligence and large language models and how much their design, architecture and training will impact their utility and later, the real life impacts to humans (whether this is medical diagnosis and treatment, financial markets, or your employment and financial stability) don’t we want a more diverse cohort of people involved in each and everyone of these steps from design all the way through to the company executive?
Tech solving DEI?
Will companies need to wait until the first class action against an AI platform that didn’t pick up millions of lung cancer diagnoses because it employed an all male engineering team, to train its models on all male data with an all male executive team that never asked the question about how effective this might be on women, before an all male board finally acknowledges D.E.I should be part of its risk matrix?
They say that if D.E.I actually made companies more successful, companies wouldn’t abandon D.E.I initiatives.
Merit, free markets and capitalism would win out, eventually. Others say technology is the great equaliser — that this renders D.E.I unnecessary because it enables anyone, no matter their systemic disadvantage to create whatever they want.
Neither of these are true.
Most companies and people are not benevolent, nor are they reliable arbiters of merit.
Companies have to do and consider things they don’t want to do all the time, because it protects society more broadly — from meeting regulations for safety through to compliance and risk. And they don’t do this out of the goodness of their heart, they only do it because there is a stick (ie personal fines, criminal and civil actions for the Board and executives) if they don’t.
Likewise, technology is not the leveller the industry thinks it is, if it were, then then the only women and people of colour standing next to President Trump at his inauguration wouldn’t be the wives and girlfriends of tech oligarchs, they would be tech oligarchs themselves.
Marc Andreessen is one of the tech oligarchs behind the current movement towards a more techno-libertarian future and its infiltration into U.S politics.
Now a venture capitalist alongside Ben Horowitz, also a supporter of the Trump administration, Andreessen made his fortune first as the cofounder of internet browser Netscape – a technology that no-one under the age of 40 will probably remember because it has been rendered irrelevant.
Marc and his brethren may have made D.E.I. D.O.A. for now, but perhaps the better question is ….in 10 years, will we look back and wonder if, in rejecting D.E.I., was this the start of what made today’s most powerful tech platforms and their leaders, go the way of Netscape?
- Elaine Stead is the founder and MD of Human VC. She writes on Medium here
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