UC Press Blog

By Oneya Fennell Okuwobi, author of Who Pays for Diversity?: Why Programs Fail at Racial Equity and What to Do about It

Inspiring an imagination for change is one of the hardest things to accomplish in the classroom. My students are brilliant at understanding social problems. They can connect causes of inequality across the globe and analyze how the past informs the present. However, it is hard for them, and sometimes me, to see beyond a slightly better version of the status quo when it comes to figuring out how justice and equity might work.

When we don’t go far enough in our imagination of what could be, we get compromises like workplace diversity programs. These programs began in the 1980s, as the Reagan administration loosened equal opportunity enforcement. Human resources departments, needing to justify their continued existence, turned to diversity management to stay organizationally relevant. Advocates of just workplaces followed this change because it was better than nothing. Yet, diversity didn’t fill the place of equal opportunity enforcement; diversity’s metrics were largely decided within individual workplaces and lacked links to what would be effective for the advancement of women and employees of color. What’s more, they were tied to the business case for diversity, which is “the proposition that a diverse workforce is essential to serve a diverse customer base, to gain legitimacy in the eyes of a diverse public, and to generate workable solutions within a global economy.” The problem in the business case is more about what it doesn’t say than what it does. Workers and what benefits them are nowhere to be found in this justification for diversity programs. 

So, what has resulted from this compromise? By interviewing 60 Black, Asian, and Latine/x employees across diverse churches, universities, and corporations, I found that diversity programs often have unintended negative consequences for them. Far from receiving an undeserved gift in the form of DEI, these employees end up paying the cost for their workplaces to appear diverse. 

The costs of diversity that I find are threefold. First are heavy work burdens. Employees of color often must attend meetings, pose for pictures, or even go on trips just so their department won’t show up with only white employees. Beyond the use of their images and bodies to display diversity, employees of color are often made responsible for diversity committees, work beyond their job description that often goes unlauded and unpaid. 

The second cost of diversity derives from how employees of color perceive the rightness of their employer’s actions, something we call legitimacy. These employees see how their workplace purports to be diverse to outside parties, yet doesn’t meet that standard in daily reality. The distance between the image and the facts on the ground creates feelings of guilt for employees of color and disillusionment from being part of something that isn’t quite true. 

Finally, employees of color experience their identity being subsumed to what their employer needs for the image of diversity. This often entails employees being visibly non-white enough to display diversity, but not so non-white as to make their coworkers uncomfortable through speech or standards of dress. This intrusion into identity makes it difficult for employees of color to develop a holistic professional and personal identity. These three costs result in physical, mental, and emotional strains on employees of color in diverse workplaces.

While employers gained in reputation and customers from workplace diversity initiatives, employees of color paid for them in their workload, well-being, and opportunities for advancement. In this time of upheaval with companies either walking away from or doubling down on their DEI initiatives, I believe we can imagine another way.

What if, in place of the business case for diversity, we focused on equity and organizational justice? Organizational justice is when there are fair processes, fair outcomes, and fair interactions within the workplace. Equity is where every employee has what they need to succeed. In the workplace, a focus on justice and equity would alleviate heavy work burdens by matching job descriptions to the work done by employees. An explicit recognition of systemic racial inequality would ensure that employees who take on more work by virtue of their minoritized identities could be recognized for that work. It would also require that workplaces focus on the actions done internally to support all employees rather than the image projected externally. Finally, just and equitable workplaces would enable employees’ holistic identities by promoting leaders who use inclusive practices including focused, supportive, and fair treatment of all employees. Alongside these activities, regular assessments could ensure that the workplace climate remained employee-focused and surface pain points for remediation.

 Unlike the business case for diversity, organizational justice and equity benefit workers through improved well-being, job satisfaction, and commitment. They also benefit workplaces through reduced employee turnover and increased capacity of employees. Organizational justice and equity are both morally laudable and financially smart because they include all of us.

As Sociologist Eric Olin Wright once wrote, “While we live in a social world that generates harms, we also have the capacity to imagine alternative worlds where such harms are absent.”^[1] Imagining employee-centered changes to our workplaces can be difficult because for too long, we haven’t seen it. Yet, it is an urgent task that we cannot neglect. When we begin to think better is possible in the workplace, we are less likely to accept compromises and more likely to fight collectively for a just future.

^[1] Wright, Eric O. 2011. “Real Utopias.” Contexts 10(2): 36–42.