No judgement on whether diversity is in of itself good or bad, just wondering whether its something that people think about culturally
There are also cringe worthy attempts to make language "inclusive" and gender neutral. I think it is restricted to certain academic faculties but it includes journalism sadly. It creeps into a lot of stuff though.
What is strange is that proponents do not care about efficiency and effect of these measures at all, so it is probably more of a vehicle to stick it to some group they feel would deserve it. I do believe that people don't speak freely about it, but there is certainly also some effort to exclude those that demand inclusion from others by now because they are often plain bullies. At this point I would call that self-defense instead of discrimination. That word was already brought up to be redefined, so why not. So if you are some kind of uterus ultra, you won't come far either and voices cooled a bit down lately.
In the workplace it isn't really a topic at all aside from advertising and PR, because it is mostly a media phenomenon.
It’s probably a bigger thing in the UK but that has much more cultural influence from the USA than the EU would.
It's definitely a very common thing here in the UK, although perhaps it's quite regional. I know every job I've had in the past ~5 years I've been involved in conservations about whether we should hire someone based on their race / gender, but I do work in the London / South West area and people tend to be quite "progressive" politically here.
That said, in the UK this seems to be something that occurs far more often in the public sector. Over the last few years contracting in both the public and private sector I've found diversity training and diversity hiring to basically be the norm for public companies. In many cases the diversity hiring in public companies will even go so far as to explicitly exclude certain candidates based on their race / gender. In the private sector I've found it tends to be more subtle, a position might be opened up for anyone to apply on paper, but conversations around hiring a candidate based on some immutable characteristic will naturally arise. My guess is that private companies don't want to deal with the backlash which can occur from partaking in explicit acts of discrimination and tend not to set explicit racial / gender quotas like public companies do.
- Donald Trump and related shenanigans
- Black Lives Matters protests w/ more direct exposure to police violence
- A thoughtful black president that was treated with irrational disdain by the opposing party
Probably pre-Obama, the US 'diversity' initiatives would look more like what you see in the EU now. But it's become such a core fabric of US partisan politics, its far more salient here.
This on top of America's already long history of (ostensibly) promoting multicultural democracy.