According to a new report by The Wall Street Journal, support for diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across corporations is wearing down. As a result, most people simply don’t care about a diverse workplace. With the Supreme Court ruling on June 29th that colleges and universities cannot use race as the basis of admissions, it reinforced the workplace mindset.
Their poll uncovered that 32% of workers considered working at an ethnically diverse company “very important” to them, but 38% said it was “not too/not at all important.” They also discovered that 26% found an “equal mix of men and women” to be “very important” to 26% of workers, with 44% reporting it wasn’t important at all. Back in 2022, a Gallup survey found that 84% of companies would be pouring extra funds into DEI projects. Yet in 2023, that number plunged to 59%.
With the Supreme Court ruling, many companies are wondering if this could happen to their hiring practices in the future. Even though employment is supposed to be all about the best person for the job, companies have been forced to pour more and more effort into the idea of keeping the number of minorities and women employed in a company on par with their other workers.
This has sent the cost of goods skyrocketing, and in many cases, it means the best candidate has been passed over countless times simply to keep the numbers rolling along. By encouraging companies to abandon the DEI incentives, we are telling them that the melting pot of the globe doesn’t need a stuffy HR rep forcing diversity on us. We can find it ourselves, and the best and brightest will make themselves known enough to get here.
