The woke roll back continues

Because most are being implemented and written in a way that means your staff body is actually less representative of wider society and less diverse.
As we've seen so many times on these boards, these kinds of policies tend to have a heavy slant towards supporting highly privileged spicy straights to the detriment of others, with minority and disabled women taking the biggest hits
It's not actually inclusive or diverse if the people who actually need it are losing out.
I'd like to see genuine efforts by companies to employ and support diverse candidates. Right now that starts with scrapping policies that do the opposite of what they say on the tin.

No one should be hired to fulfill a quota and that is not what DEI policies should be about. It should really be about true meritocracy. The best for the job regardless of identity, being part of the club etc. And you need policies to help those who lead organisations to think out of the box about what that looks like and also to enable them to nurture all talent within the company - not just talent that fits their expectation of where talent usually resides.

A simple example is the NHS. Those from non-White Backgrounds make up almost 50% of nurses and midwives at Band 5 level and only 9% at Band 8 and above. And this disparity has been there for decades. The country is paying for this - as these nurses move to other jurisdictions without such baked in racism in the system and the NHS pays ridiculous amounts for agency staff/bank rates etc. Direct result: £180 billion NHS budget does not touch the sides of the needs of the population. The cost of racism to the NHS is estimated at £2.3billion. We are now at a point the service cannot afford to fund innovative treatments such as the recent dementia drug and others in the pipeline.

Yet, we are celebrating instead of pushing for better policies to address and deliver equity

Mentoring is important as progression often results from knowing how the system works, understanding the nuances of work place culture which isn't taught in school and is often the preserve of white males. It helps level the playing field. And there is intersectionality between race and poverty etc. A Black person - even a privately educated one - is unlikely to achieve the same heights as an equivalently educated White person in the UK and that is due to systemic issues. The gender pay gap is another example. So whilst there are some tokenistic examples, the reality is equity remains out of reach and policies are required to enable all of society, not just some to maximise potential. It makes business sense for companies and for society
And women celebrating what is going on is an own goal

I'm not convinced that it's generally the responsibility of employers to make up for the kinds of things that mean there are barriers in some types of work - things like early education, for example. But also, not all disparities in numbers are related to some kind of discrimination.

I also think it's not actually all that necessary that all work sectors reflect social demographics. If there are a lot of white plumbers, but not many Asian plumbers, so long as there is nothing keeping anyone out of plumbing, what's the issue? Someculturs are less likely to encourage their kids into trades, and some put a lot of emphasis on university.

The issue with DEI as the likes of Jack Daniels has been doing it is completely focused towards lgbtqi with the emphasis on tq so if you employ a middle aged white male who claims to be a transwoman and a lesbian extra brownie points so you've ticked off trans, a woman and lesbian so wonderful for your diversity figures but shit for reality because they are still employing a middle aged white male.

The current dei for these companies needs tearing up and rewriting with the actual spirit of the law at its heart.

I agree with this, but I think we can be more ambitious than just seek to address discrimination when it occurs.

There are reasons why people from certain groups are underrepresented in certain roles and companies. We need to address them, not just engineer things so people from the underrepresented groups are slotted in. Unless they are the best candidates, a host of issues will arise.

In the last 10 years I have worked with people who have massively under performed due to being slotted in as part of a quota. Some of whom had significant potential, and if they had had better early opportunities, or better professional development, would have become shining stars (this is what EDI initiative should be about - getting the best people for the role and not letting them slip through the net due to not having had the right opportunities until 'now'). Some have just been rubbish hires and selected for quota reasons.

I think there are plenty of people out there that think companies should hire people from marginalised groups as this is social justice. Unless they are a charity with this specific aim, this is crazy. Furthermore, it's somewhat discriminatory when done so with an unconscious assumption that those people can't get the job on merit.

I fully acknowledge that corporate DEI is often window dressing. However the trans issue is really just a smokescreen. These companies don't want to deal with other forms of discrimination, but to say so would be vastly unpopular. That's why the American right is so obsessed with trans people. They certainly don't care about women's rights.

I certainly do, this doesn’t seem a good move to me.

But that wasn’t happening for decades was it? Meritocracy didn’t exist. If you were a well educated white heterosexual male you were more likely to get the job. This isn’t like a really fair and open process has been replaced with a very narrow and selective one. What do you want the alternative to be if diversity and inclusion is too woke and to be scrapped? Saying “the best person gets the job” would work if we didn’t live in a society full of prejudice and discrimination.

Regarding your examples. Plumbers = yes, more women would be brilliant, I imagine it’s white dominated too. White males don’t pop out the womb being excellent plumbers. Teachers = yes, especially primary. It would be great if it wasn’t seen as a female. This said, although teaching is female dominated guess who tends to dominate senior leadership positions? The Premier League = how many black managers or owners do you see? You can’t just pick one job role out and say it’s really reflective.

I am all for the best person getting the job but it simply wouldn’t happen regardless of D&I policies because we do not live in a fair society. We never have.

This ^^

I've never understood why it's a good thing that "the staff body" should reflect the composition of wider society.

I'd prefer that "the staff body" was made up of the best people to do the job - and I'd always thought that that was the whole point of equality and increasing diversity - they both widen the pool of talent that you can call upon and don't restrict you to looking just at white middle-class males - or whatever.

But if the purpose of DEI is just to try to remedy some perceived inequality of opportunity or other unfairness - historic or current - then it isn't going to work just by employing people on the basis of their sex or colour. It's only going to work by addressing the root causes of those inequalities and unfairness - and that means going back to more fundamental building blocks of society. Employing people just because they belong to a particular group isn't going to work.

And if DEI is about removing inequality of opportunity and unfairness, organisations ought to be employing more poorly educated working class white boys as they seem to be the ones missing out at the moment.

I worked as a NHS manager for 25 years. I think it all that time my trust was criticised by regulatory bodies because the composition of the board did not reflect the community we served. We had too many women executive directors and too many non-white executive directors. But nobody cared because they were the best people for the job. And that's what you need to look at - not whether somebody belongs to some group with an "identity".

Unfortunately not. It loads halfway then stops. This site hasn't loaded properly for a few weeks now but not sure if its them or me.

Jack Daniels, a company that profits off addictions and damaging people's organs and doesn't care that their products increase domestic violence, aren't woke? I'm shocked.

@Combattingthemoaners

"
Also struggling with this one myself! Making sure your staff body reflects wider society is a bad thing and “woke”? I don’t get it."

Because a company's employees (or as you describe it staff body) should be based on those that want who the job and who are the best candidates.

Trying to make your employees (or staff body) a mirror of society in terms of it's composition is both impossible to achieve and the act of trying to do so means selection becomes based on identity rather than ability.

95% of plumbers are male, 76% of teachers are female, 43% of footballers in the Premiership are black. Should this all change to become more reflective of society??

You are imposing your own discriminatory framework over the voice of someone with less power than you.
This is totally unacceptable in this space.
Instead of being an ally you have chosen to speak over and censor bipoc disabled voices.

You really need to reflect.

No just gently sharing some thoughts as you seem really wound up and angry.

But speak however you like but do be mindful of MN guidelines.

and now your telling me how I should speak? oh my god
Just stop

This thread is deeply disturbing. It’s such a childish knee jerk reaction to be “anti-woke”. I have fought so long and so hard for inclusion and recognition of value in the workplace of women, of POC, of gay and lesbian people, of people with disabilities.

It is utterly sickening to see the destruction of that celebrated by people.

I’m autistic so sarcasm not my thing but suspect that you are being sarcastic about being distressed?

If it’s not sarcasm then perhaps don’t be mean to people and then get uppity when they call you out?

in any case I don’t think your attitude is helpful in trying to promote your cause (whatever that may be)

Why am I not surprised that staunch defenders of the new liberal fundermentalism are the first to censor a mixed race disabled working class women.
Do you think this might be why EDI leaves a bad taste in most peoples mouths?

i cant celebrate this - the best DEI initiatives arent about division, they're about being inclusive and removing barriers for some people. My workplace held all important meetings at 4pm (after hours) until it was pointed out that this time significantly reduced the input of working parents and carers. Now the time of meetings is rotated. We also had a prayer room that was only accessible by steep stairs, very difficult for anyone with mobility issues to use. Not everything is "woke"

I 've reported your post for the extreme emotional distress its caused me.

Me too. As far as I can tell, it's a shortcut used by people who aren't willing (able?) to form an argument to specifically address the thing they're concerned about and so just lump it in with everything else they don't like as "woke".

And so, very ironically, it's really just forced teaming. Just as our GC side has been perceptive in criticising the forced teaming of the T with the LGB, increasingly being GC seems to carry the assumption that you'll hold a suite of other views too. I used to enjoy KJK's rants about TW but, despite her insistence that she's a single issue activist, she does lately spend a lot of time on mad paranoid rants about two-tier policing and inverse snobbery about how everyone supposedly hates the working class. See also Glinner who has glided from trans issues to yelling about woke "NPCs" in reference to anyone who expresses mild criticism of Israel's actions or thinks Elon Musk is a bit bonkers.

And, just as ironically, it ("woke") is also a thought-terminating cliche. And after all our criticism of "trans women are women" and "my existence isn't up for debate", too! Tsk.

one that celebrates the return to racism, sexism and ableism. Seriously what the fuck?

No one said anything like this though.

DEI is not synonymous with avoiding discrimination etc.

It's way of thinking that is crude and reductionist and so doesn't lead to effective policies.