DEI DIDN'T DIE. THE PERFORMANCE OF IT DID.

In May 2024, I wrote a piece for Brainz Magazine asking whether DEI was dead. My answer then: no — but it needed a culture revolution, not another statement.

Two years later, the headlines say I was wrong. Meta scrapped its programs. Accenture sunset its diversity goals. Goldman Sachs walked back its board diversity pledge. Executive orders dismantled DEI across the federal government and its contractors. If you only read the coverage, DEI is a corpse.

Read the data instead, and a different picture shows up. According to Resume.org, only about 5% of companies with DEI programs have actually eliminated them. Pew Research finds 56% of U.S. workers still say focusing on DEI at work is a good thing. Costco and Apple publicly defended their programs against shareholder pressure. Delta's leadership said on an earnings call that their commitments are critical to the business.

So what actually died? The performance of DEI. The black squares. The pledges with no budget attached. The chief diversity officer hired in 2020 and given a mandate but no authority. The annual training nobody remembered by Thursday.

Good. That version deserved to die. It was never going to work, and I said so when it was popular to pretend otherwise.

An honest word about the business case

Here's where I'm going to do something most people writing about this topic won't: tell you the research landscape got complicated.

For a decade, the case for DEI leaned heavily on McKinsey's reports linking executive diversity to financial outperformance — the famous finding that top-quartile companies for ethnic diversity were 36% more likely to outperform on profitability. Those numbers built a thousand board decks, including some of mine.

In the last two years, academic researchers attempted to replicate those findings with S&P 500 data and couldn't. McKinsey itself has acknowledged its research identifies correlation, not causation. Critics have piled on; defenders point to other studies — BCG's finding that diverse management teams generate more innovation revenue, Morgan Stanley's data on share-price performance of gender-diverse companies — that still hold.

You can respond to this two ways. You can pretend the critique doesn't exist and keep citing a contested statistic, which is exactly the kind of performative move that got DEI into trouble. Or you can do what I'd tell any client to do with a shaky data point: stop leaning on it and look at what you can actually defend.

Because here's the thing — the strongest case for inclusive hiring was never a correlational stock-performance study. It was always about decision quality, and that case is intact.

The case that survives scrutiny

Strip away the branding and ask what inclusive hiring actually is in practice: evaluating people on what they can do instead of on proxies, pattern matching, and the comfort of familiarity.

That's not a political position. That's just good system design. When your interview process selects for "people who remind me of people who worked out before," you're not selecting for quality — you're selecting for familiarity and calling it instinct. Every hiring manager who has rushed a search and grabbed the candidate who "felt right" knows how that movie ends. I've spent nearly a decade cleaning up after it.

The talent math hasn't changed either. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts ethnic and racial minorities at 39% of the U.S. workforce and climbing. LinkedIn finds 76% of job seekers say diversity matters when they evaluate offers. Catalyst reports 86% of Gen Z employees are more likely to stay with employers that support inclusion. You can have opinions about DEI as a brand. You cannot opt out of the workforce you're hiring from — or the one deciding whether to accept your offer.

And the people most often overlooked in hiring and advancement are still, in my direct experience across hundreds of searches, not the least capable. They're the least positioned. Who gets seen, who gets interviewed, who gets the benefit of the doubt — none of that is a neutral process, and it never has been. Pew's pay data makes the compounding cost visible: Black women earning 70 cents, Hispanic women 65 cents, against the white male dollar.

What to build instead of what got torn down

If you're a talent leader navigating this moment — pressure from one side to scrap everything, pressure from the other to defend programs you privately know weren't working — here's the reframe I give clients:

Stop defending programs. Start defending decisions. A standalone DEI program is an easy political target and an easy budget cut. Structured interviews, defined evaluation criteria, skills-based screening, posting roles where different networks can actually see them — those are hiring quality improvements that happen to be equitable, and they're nearly impossible to argue against on the merits.

Move the work upstream. Most bias doesn't happen in the final interview. It happens in the job description written in a hurry, the "must have" requirements nobody questioned, the sourcing channels that only reach one network. Fix the inputs and the outcomes shift without a single quota.

Measure what you'd defend in a deposition. Vanity diversity metrics invited the backlash. Decision-quality metrics — pass-through rates by stage, offer-acceptance patterns, first-year retention by source — tell you whether your process is actually fair and actually working. That data protects you in every direction.

Say what you mean, plainly. The companies weathering this moment best aren't the loudest or the quietest. They're the clearest. They can explain in one sentence why their practices exist and what business problem each one solves. If you can't, that's the work.

The revolution I asked for is the one that's happening

In 2024, I argued DEI needed a culture revolution — a shift from performance to practice, from statements to systems. The rollback era, brutal as it's been, is forcing exactly that sorting. The theater is gone. What's left, at the organizations doing this seriously, is quieter and sturdier: hiring systems designed to find capability wherever it actually lives.

That was always the point. I built this firm on it — it's on our values page, and it's in every engagement we run: inclusive by design, not by declaration.

The companies that confused the announcement for the work are relieved to stop announcing. The companies that did the work are still doing it. In five years, only one of those groups will have the talent.

Desiree Goldey is the Founder & CEO of Do Better Consulting, a 2024 Top HR Innovator, and a Brainz Magazine Executive Contributor. This piece builds on her 2024 Brainz article, "Is DEI Dead? No, It Needs a Culture Revolution."