The untold story of how Shopify killed DEI
thelogic.co
thelogic.co
However, I don't understand what DEI programs inside a company post hiring are supposed to "DO" and I think a lot of expectations around them start to very quickly expose some absurdities and amorphous nature of the idea surrounding internal private company DEI programs.
In the end private companies can't undo racism, they can't undo the past, that's a human problem that private companies whose job it is to make money just aren't equipped to address in a way that would satisfy folks concerned with other social problems.
For Shopify:
>Wavering internal support turned into concrete action in recent months when entire teams dedicated to helping Black and Indigenous entrepreneurs were laid off.
Is that even helpful? Is Shopify the right choice for Black and Indigenous entrepreneurs? Shopify is just a product. Shopify isn't a charity, they're not necessarily going to produce a positive outcome for every customer ... so emphasizing customers among a minority, is that a net positive for sure?
That's the weird aspect I wonder about DEI and external efforts.
Internally, it feels like a private company having resource groups for specific minorities again runs into a similar issue where that's not the company's motivation, or even competency ...
I think private companies can help, but their reach is very limited and larger social problems are just not theirs to solve and they're the wrong people / not equipped to do it.
I don't think your theory makes much sense.
> Store-risk metrics include average store compensation, average total store sales, and a "diversity index" that represents the racial and ethnic diversity of every store. Stores at higher risk of unionizing have lower diversity
Nearly all top tech companies pushed DEI, and nearly all of them were found to be involved in anti worker activities in the past.
On top of that, you can find many books about how diverse democracies fail - here’s one from obamas reading list: https://www.amazon.com/Great-Experiment-Diverse-Democracies-...
Additionally, here’s a quote from Aristotle on diversity: “ And it is a mark of a tyrant to have men of foreign extraction rather than citizens as guests at table and companions, feeling that citizens are hostile but strangers make no claim against him”.
Adding racial diversity is a tried and true tactic over millennia to allow a small group to rule over a larger. It prevents the populace from organizing and keeps them divided. It’s no coincidence the billionaires who are overseeing the ever increasing wealth gap have pushed “diversity is our strength” and convinced a large portion of the population to defend this position.
I find it fascinating and frustrating that the taboo around examining DEI critically was so strong it took an autocrat to break it.
- Men would create a hostile environment for women, I worked in a couple of companies which were 85%+ men, any new hire that was a woman suffered some kind of harassment, over or covert ("locker room talk" bullshit). This constantly pushed women out.
- Diversity of ethnicities/nationalities brought a lot of different perspectives, having different cultures working together always helped teams I worked at to consider points of view that would only have surfaced later. Even ways of working that would cross-pollinate, like living a different culture would make you adopt practices that you think are improvements over yours.
- Inclusion of people with disabilities, in 2005 I would never imagine the company I was working for to hire a blind person, there was an extreme bias they wouldn't be able to do the work. Nowadays I've worked with a few blind people, a few with reduced mobility that didn't even use a keyboard for typing, accommodations were needed but nothing that actually impacted work while improving their lives tremendously. Who would be caring about doing this effort if DEI didn't become a thing?
I find it fascinating how the USA can go to either extreme so quickly, I do understand why it might have become such an annoyance to people opposed to it, feels like activism is so overboard that ended up being detrimental to the cause. I don't work in the USA so I really don't feel this need to push against any of the actions I've experienced in my life, at all points it actually helped people with minimal impact to myself while also helping me to realise biases and work on them, and I feel that's the actual societal change that DEI initiatives helps with: de-estranging others that are not 100% similar to you.
I think DEI most places was pretty light / inconsequential… but you only hear about the extreme cases because that’s more interesting.
A company doing that isn't trying to solve the underlying issue. That is indeed, as you noted, probably something they cannot do and others are better equipped to handle it.
For instance suppose you find out that many women with young children are not coming to your business because they have no one to look after the kids while the mother is there. You might add a supervised playroom so the mothers can bring the kids and leave them in the playroom.
This doesn't come anywhere near solving the underlying issue of daycare being too expensive for many parents but it could increase your business and make the lives of those mothers tangibly better.
So even before disparate impact became a legal threat to corporations, executives were feeling the pressure to comply with whatever the current expectations were on the matter.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gq7le0-XAAANHXX?format=png&name=...
It is and always has been just a way to gain favor with those who value DEI, almost no company actually cares about it outside gaining brownie points with consumers/users who value DEI and secondary potentially attracting top talent who happen to value DEI themselves. But if DEI programs were never a thing in the first place and they really are top talent the company would have valued them either way.
In my opinion DEI is moreso a way to prop up those who are not actually top talent but think they deserve to be. The reality though, is if you actually were you would not need a DEI program to get hired. Plenty of people from diverse backgrounds succeeded and will continue to succeed despite DEI programs.
I do not think DEI completely bad personally, I just do not believe it accomplishes the goals it claims to - which seem to always include increasing revenue and profits from getting other perspectives. But the reality is most companies became successful despite not having these other perspectives and before they adhered to DEI in the first place. I've never seen or heard of implementing a DEI plan actually having a real ROI outside of marketing. In almost all cases it is probably a money sink outside of being a marketing buzzword.
All this said as someone who would probably fall into the background of somebody who DEI would claim to support as someone from a Latino background.
It's a private company that exists to make money, of course anything they announce publicly / is there to make them look good.
That's not bad, that's just understanding the nature of these organizations.
If you work at a corporation that ditched DEI and are indignant, put your money where your mouth is and just fucking donate to causes that really address societal inequality. Or, work at a company that will match any donation you make to a registered 501c3 charity. I have a buddy that works at Goldman Sachs and know for a fact that any time he makes a donation under a certain $$ limit, Goldman matches it dollar-for-dollar. He's donated to a lot of great charities and Goldman has been all too happy to follow his donation. Doctors without Borders, Red Cross, Habitat for Humanity, no-kill animal rescue shelters, soup kitchens, etc - all great causes.
I spent a few months in early 2022 working at a company that had recently hired a DEI team. That team told me my team needed more diversity...which was odd, because my team consisted of me (a WASP, albeit one on the ADHD/Autism spectrum), a young jewish dude from the midwest fresh out of college, a mid-30s jewish guy, an older gay Bahamian guy, 2 hispanic females, a hispanic male, an Egyptian muslim guy and an older gentleman from Boston who was of Irish descent. What were we missing?
What, no Congolese lepers and Tibetan monks? Terrible diversity failure.
This became another extractive huckster industry, attempting to wear the cloak of virtue.