Abdullah Fayyad
speaker
55 appearances
3 recordings
2 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Apr 2025
Abdullah Fayyad’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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I'm a writer at Vox, and I write a lot about race and class.
Well, it's interesting because, you know, the history of this really does start with federal workers, or at least federal contractors, starting in the 1960s.
A lot of people now think of DEI just because it's a buzzword.
It's become part of the culture wars, a big part of the Republican crusade in this Trump administration is to attack DEI. But it really goes back many decades when President Kennedy signed an executive order that required federal contractors to actively not discriminate in their hiring process. That was followed by an actual tangible law passed by Congress, the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
which required all companies of a certain size to make sure that they do not discriminate against their employees or people they might hire.
You know, and this eventually evolved into DEI as we know it today. Private companies really took it and ran with it. We started seeing companies in the 1960s, late 1960s, early 1970s, not just complying with the law, but going a little bit further. So at first, you know, these all look similar to what we know now, you know, anti-harassment training, things like that, that were
you know, essentially targeted at making sure that employees and companies complied with the law so that they're not liable. But there were companies like IBM that took it a step further. Maybe it was to avoid bad press. Maybe it was to get good press. This idea that this wasn't just something that we have to do in order to comply with the law, but it's a matter of
corporate social responsibility. And so, you know, that's kind of the DEI that we know it today came from that origin.
Well, yeah, I mean, DEI, like you noted, I mean, it's become a slur. It's become oftentimes a racial or sexist slur. Anytime there is a woman in a position that's higher position, you know, it's said to be a DEI hire. Anytime it's a non-white person, it's a DEI hire, no matter how many qualifications they have for that job. We've got it. DEI hire in here?
On the right, we keep hearing this repeated talking point that these are DEI hires. But DEI, as it is today in companies, takes many forms. Most notable is, you know, things that have been around for a really long time.
So anytime you start a new job at a company, chances are you had to sit through, you know, these trainings about harassment in the workplace, be it sexual harassment, racism, implicit bias training. And then we see other initiatives as well that companies take on, you know, celebrations of certain heritage months and heritage events and things like that.
But another major part of DEI is just to make sure that your recruitment process is fair. It's not a matter of, oh, we need quotas or we need to make sure that there are only a certain amount of white men in management or in certain parts of a company. A lot of DEI is to make sure that we have an equal employment opportunities.
I think this kind of really evolved out of the 1980s when companies started to see diversity in hiring and just diversity more broadly as not just a moral thing to do, but that it was actually good for your bottom line as well. I don't know that there are many studies that show that a diverse workforce creates more profits necessarily, but where that really came from
In 1987, there was a report from a think tank called the Hudson Institute. The report was called Workforce 2000. In the year 2000. This came out in 1987, and it kind of took the corporate world by storm. It went viral at the time, if that's not a word that was used then. Their version of viral.
This was a report that every major company was reading, and it essentially was making predictions for what the American workforce was going to look like in the year 2000. And it was telling these companies that the workforce is diversifying at a really rapid rate, both by gender and by race, immigrant status and the like.
And essentially, companies really took that to heart because they wanted to remain competitive. And to remain competitive, you had to be competitive among the workforce, not just consumers. But if you wanted to hire good talent and the workforce was changing, these companies really tried to change their policies in order to adapt to this new world that was being created in the U.S.
for a more diverse workforce. So that's the kind of business argument, that's where it started from.
Well, I mean, I think M is not too far off. I happen to agree with a lot of what they said, you know, which is a lot of the DEI initiatives that we have seen at many major companies, at academic institutions, have largely been performative. And that's why what we see oftentimes and why there's a lot of criticism of DEI programs, not just from the right, but from the left as well.
You bring in a speaker, a one-time thing, or you do anti-harassment trainings and implicit bias trainings that study after study have shown have been largely ineffective, and some studies have actually shown them cause antagonism. They have been antagonizing some people in management.
But the reason we do it is in large part because companies are performing for their employees, showing them that they are saying the right things, but it doesn't always mean that they're doing the right things. You know, one of the best examples of this is that, you know, we see pay discrimination at company after company after company.
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