DEI Doesn't Need to Be Popular, but It Does Need to Be Effective

Reckoning with the weaknesses of status-quo DEI allows us to build better.

I'm seeing too many leaders still stuck on the question of whether diversity, equity, and inclusion are popular, when we should be asking ourselves whether it achieves what it aspires to — and if not, how we might do better.

The popularity question has already been answered: a supermajority of people believe in the value of a more diverse society. In a 2024 study, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that a whopping 82% of respondents agreed with statements supporting greater diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And yet, a Pew Research Center survey in 2024 found that support for workplace DEI had dropped to just above 50% among Americans. A Post-Ipsos study that same year found that while 69% of their respondents supported the work of DEI when given a definition of diversity, equity, and inclusion, support fell to 61% when respondents evaluated just the acronym on its own.

Leaders see the contentiousness of DEI and make the critical mistake of thinking it's just a matter of optics. They believe that if they bring the work underground or just call it by another name, they will be able to ride out the moment unscathed. But they misunderstand. Anti-DEI arguments get their peculiar staying power not from workplace DEI’s unpopularity, but from its perceived ineffectiveness.

A YouGov poll conducted in early 2025 asked respondents what effect workplace diversity, equity, and inclusion programs had had on them, whether positive, negative, or neutral, and the results took me aback:

While only 16% shared that DEI had harmed them, a similarly meager 20% indicated that DEI had positively impacted them, with the largest group — more than 60% combined — responding with “no effect” or “don’t know.” Across all ages, genders, regions, and political orientations surveyed, this overall pattern held true. Even among the group with the highest perception of benefit, Black respondents, just 34% felt that they had benefited from workplace DEI; 59% felt no effect or weren’t sure.

To the vast majority of people, workplace DEI was neither harmful nor beneficial. It was just simply ineffective, and by virtue of that ineffectiveness, irrelevant.

In the vaccuum left by its ineffectiveness, anti-DEI advocates inject malice and misinformation. They will continue to exploit this weakness until the substance of workplace DEI changes, whatever new name it adopts. Most workplace DEI efforts at present have yet to reduce discrimination, improve worker wellbeing, eliminate bias from employment processes, or build truly inclusive company cultures. What if they were to? What if the solution was not better optics, but better impact?

This is the real battle ahead for diversity, equity, and inclusion. Not a narrative battle for popularity, but an operational battle for real impact. Will our leaders meet the moment?