Upward Compatible

I founded a DEI team for our company. About a year and a half ago, I felt so proud of this accomplishment — after campaigning for it and working together with my dev team lead, and making a case to the whole management team, we were approved for starting a DEI team with its own budget. I thought this was a great step for a relatively small company — a way to make diversity, equity & inclusion a part of our DNA, a part of our ‘normal’ rather than an afterthought. It would allow us to tackle diversity from the get-go, making sure that our employee demographics would match up with our worldwide clients and ambition. Diverse companies boost employee happiness, cooperation, and overall profitability. The statistics are pretty clear on that. Or, they were.

But in recent months, I became aware that ‘DEI’ is used as a slur in conservative circles, something to fear and hate, going the same route of appropriating progressive language to corrupt it into a symbol to bash and mock, like ‘woke’. Tale as old as time, but accelerated by social media. For a certain chunk of the population, DEI is now synonymous with something bad. And now a report has come out that ties DEI with negative outcomes for company culture, too.

I made a DEI team… but was it a mistake? Can I hold on to this accomplishment, or should I change course?

This article was originally posted on Medium.com on May 27th, 2020.

A friend of mine recently asked me to review a job posting for the company he works for; they are trying to attract a more diverse workforce. As a woman who works in technology, I’ve read my share of red-flag-raising job openings, and I’ve had to deal with plenty of situations that would send anyone who doesn’t fit the white straight cisgender middle-class dude stereotype of a developer running.

It wasn’t until I started to review this particular text I realised I had a lot of opinions about this. And what better to do with those but compile a list of what (not) to do?