“We have to be courageous Reverand. Al Sharpton. We have to continue to make them say the words, diversity, equity and inclusion, not just DEI, because the virtues are in the words. “Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.” Every humane society respects those things.” – Benjamin Crump
The first month of this year has finally been and gone, and it’s safe to say that much has transpired on an inter-national scale. There have been numerous misguided conversations about Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) as it is often referred to in the US, and for our brothers and sisters across the pond, we are witnessing a worrying fight to erase the essence of its meaning.
This comes at a time, where this February marks LGBT+ History Month in the UK and Black History Month in the US, both important annual observances which celebrate both the achievements and historical legacies of these communities, whilst simultaneously shedding light on the systemic inequalities faced by each.
Our article simply put, looks at some of the arguments that have proliferated into the public sphere of late on equality, diversity and inclusion, and is our attempt to give clarity, and above all hope, in an ever-pressing inter-national situation.
Lost in translation
I’m reminded by my colleague from the US, that how we refer to DEI in the UK, as EDI (Equality, Diversity & Inclusion), has differing points of departure from the US, although at the heart of both, lost in the conversation is often the part about inclusion. The meaning of DEI has been hijacked, used as a smokescreen to illustrate all the ills that have gone wrong in society, or so it seems with the messaging, under the current US administration of President Donald Trump. DEI initiatives or “DEI hires”, a code word for minority groups, centred around the belief that candidates are being chosen by virtue of their identity, rather than on their hard work and merit, have been scapegoated, so much so, that the legitimacy of seeing a person from an underrepresented group in a leadership position now, automatically raises eyebrows. This, however, is not a new occurrence.
I remember in my earliest years as a student at one of the most prestigious Schools of Art in the UK, that this was what another student had not so subtly implied to me. That the reason I had got in, was because of my race, even though they themselves were from an ethnic minority group. I mention this, because we must recognise that these internalised belief systems in so-called meritocracy, are not as some will point out, colour-blind.
When I think of this argument on hiring the best candidates, being mutually exclusive to seeing underrepresented groups in those positions, I’m reminded of the British journalist and author Matthew Syed’s Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently (2021). Here he outlines rather cleverly the fallacies around meritocracy, whilst making a case for the reasons for diversity.
“Pretty much all the most challenging work today is undertaken in groups for a simple reason: problems are too complex for any one person to tackle alone.” (1)
The reason for diversity in these instances is to mitigate blind spots. A homogenous group of people on the surface, whether they are all men, women, all learning disabled or between the ages of 50 – 55, will most probably share similar perspectives. They will share in the same collective blindness. What’s even more compelling and something we should remember, is that hiring someone from an underrepresented group, let’s take for example, hiring a woman in a predominately male industry, doesn’t necessarily guarantee an increase in cognitive diversity, as in a difference in the ways people think, perceive or reason within the group. This is due to the process of acculturation, and that when you have been working or living within a particular culture, whether in the workplace or a particular society, more broadly, there can be a tendency for those operating in the space, to take up the dominant mindset over time. As Syed puts it “people who start out diverse can gravitate towards the dominant assumptions of the group.” (2) This is what I call transference without transformation, lodged in the idea that on the surface things appear to have changed, but in essence, the player is still the same.
Meritocracy
On the question of meritocracy, this is also not a new argument, that people should get where they get too, based on hard work and merit alone. After all, who would want to be picked for a job, based solely on their identity and not on their capability? However, we must scrutinise what we mean by meritocracy and understand who in fact gets rewarded. To this end, you cannot have a genuine conversation about merit, without talking about class privilege, or what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage’. This is the idea that one is already born with a head start in life, or adversely penalised for not having the right building blocks for success. Meritocracy says that we all operate on a level playing field, and that it is through our own hard work, that some of us climb up the ladder and are rewarded for our efforts, whilst for those who don’t, their failure is down to them. Yet the playing field has never been even, nor neither fair.
Sociologists Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman make this compelling case in their groundbreaking book Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (2024). Building on years of qualitatively data rich analysis, they identify who makes up the who’s who in British society. At the heart of their study is the analysis of the historical database of the Who’s Who. This is the leading source of up-to-date information on autobiographical accounts of over 32,500 influential people, hailing from all walks of life, worldwide. Entrants include ‘senior politicians, judges, civil servants, and notable figures from the arts, academia, and other areas.’ (3). The authors analysed the biographical profiles of all 125,000 entrants since 1897, taking into consideration ‘gender, location, family background, schooling, university, stated recreational pastimes, and occupation.’ (4)
Their findings reiterate that where you start in life really matters. There are nine most famous, historically male elite schools, the Clarendon Schools, including Eton and Harrow, and twelve most prestigious schools for girls, including St. Paul’s School for Girls and Cheltenham Ladies College. It is worth pointing out that whilst attending the all-male private schools, or the old boys club, remain a powerful head start for the future leaders of tomorrow, identifying whether there is a similar old girls’ network, has been harder to assess. The authors do highlight that there has been a decline in the propulsive power of these schools propelling their pupils forward into the elite, but that they still hold importance, given their connection to elite universities. Oxbridge graduates for example, those who have attended either the University of Oxford or the University of Cambridge, remain profoundly over-represented in the British elite.
“This, we argue, rests on the hub function performed by elite universities, where students from elite schools use elite universities to further cultivate networks and incubate worldviews that were initially established at school.” (5)
Closing the attainment gap
Another way of looking at this, is to reflect on a major issue that many universities have faced over the years, in trying to close the degree attainment gap. The basic premise of the attainment gap, is that there is a considerable difference in white Home British students achieving a first or 2.1, compared to non-white British students. Further, when you start to break down the differences in the attainment gap by different ethnic groups, you see that the biggest differential is between white and Black students at 57.5% compared to Whites at 80.9%. This is followed by Other at 67.8%, Asian at 70.5% and Mixed at 77.2% compared to Whites respectively. (6)
This becomes an issue when you realise that not attaining a 2.1 or higher, has a ripple effect, and can indirectly stop students, particularly from ethnic minority groups, from competing in a competitive jobs market. In recent years the Institute of Student Employers (ISE), had estimated that two-thirds of graduate recruiters, set a 2.1 classification as a minimum requirement for a graduate job. Whilst things are changing, how then do organisations who have a desire to diversify their workforce for all the right reasons, do so, when there is no pipeline of students from these communities?
In 2017 Baroness McGregor-Smith published the Race in the Workplace Review, that looked at racial inequalities in the workplace. Concluding the review with a list of 26 recommendations, she emphasised that there was still “discrimination and bias at every stage of an individual’s career, and even before it begins for people from BAME backgrounds. This bias was largely found to be structural, resulting from an unfair system that works only for a select few.” (7)
This is why when the argument that job requirements have been dumbed down, or that certain criteria have been removed, to accommodate underrepresented groups, they fail to consider the forms of indirect discrimination and bias already inherent in the system. This focuses on ‘the Deficit Model’, where it’s the student or employee who is at fault, lacking in skills, knowledge or experience, and not the environment; akin to the way that we have moved away from the medical model of disability to the social model, which says that people are disabled by barriers in society, and not by their impairment or difference.
So where do we go from here?
Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community is the title of Martin Luther King Jr’s 1967 book. Here King reflects on the Civil Rights Movement and what he hoped African Americans should do with their new freedoms and discussed the need for unity in fighting poverty, and in creating equality of opportunity. Where do we go from here was the same question that was asked by prominent civil rights leader and activist Reverend Al Sharpton, as he hosted a special Civil Rights Summit with leaders in the movement, on MSNBC News earlier this month. On the panel was Martin Luther King III the human rights activist, philanthropist and advocate and son of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King. Also on the panel was Judith Browne Dianis, the civil rights Attorney and Executive Director of Advancement Project National Office and civil rights Attorney Benjamin Crump.
Given the current political and social climate in the US, with a government administration unleashing a war on human rights and social justice, when asking the panellists where they went from there, Crump responds by saying:
“We have to be courageous Reverend Al Sharpton. We have to continue to make them say the words, diversity, equity and inclusion, not just DEI, because the virtues are in the words. “Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.” Every humane society respects those things.”
And so too must we. This is a call to action. We must continue to do the essential work of equality, diversity and inclusion, and not lose sight of its essence. Whether DEI or EDI, that is not the question.
Written by Dr. Ope Lori
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Notes:
1) Matthew Syed (2021) Rebel Ideas: The Power of Thinking Differently
(2) Ibid
(3) Who’s Who and Who Was Who [Available at https://www.ukwhoswho.com/page/946]
(4) Ibid
(5) Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman (2024) pg 134 Born to Rule: The Making and Remaking of the British Elite (2024).
(6) Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic Student Attainment at UK Universities: #CLOSINGTHEGAP (2019) [https://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/field/downloads/2021-07/bame-student-attainment.pdf]
(7) Ibid