Microsoft lays off its DEI team
dailymail.co.uk
dailymail.co.uk
Ditto for AI ethics.
I suppose one of the lessons is think very carefully before getting heavily involved in company initiatives that have the appearance of doing the the right thing from an external perspective but don't have clearly actionable results or contribute to the bottom line.
You kinda do, in a big company. Corporate culture relies on hyper-specialization: you do one thing, and you do it really, really well. If it didn't, well, the company would've remained small and had a few jack-of-all-trades wearing many hats, like most startups.
But in that environment, any task that isn't somebody's explicit job doesn't get done. The whole corporate firm is predicated on the idea that people are more productive when they're specialized. If you step outside your specialty, you're stepping on somebody else's toes and sacrificing your own performance review. So people learn not to do anything that isn't in their official job description, and if there isn't an official job description for it, nobody does it.
There needs to be a broad cultural understanding of company values with respect to DEI. I'm not sure having a dedicated team--outside of someone tracking metrics and giving some presentations--necessarily helps in that regard. As someone else asked in a comment, what concrete things is such a team supposed to do? There's certainly not going to solve society-wide pipeline issues assuming they're even solvable. And I would, perhaps naively, hope that gender-based pay discrimination, illegal hiring discrimination, etc. would be handled within an existing HR bureaucracy given that's one of their jobs.