My salute to Walmart investors for challenging this emerging madness where companies are pulling away from initiatives people have built over years to balance issues the current systems cannot do automatically: “In a letter to Walmart CEO Doug McMillon, shareholders representing $266 billion in assets expressed “deep disappointment” and demanded to know the business case behind the retailer’s decision to scrap its diversity initiatives. Following boycott threats from conservative activists, Walmart announced back in November that it would no longer consider race and gender for supplier contracts, joining a growing number of companies that have made similar policy changes.”
Yes, if you want to remove gender and race in your supply chain contracting, you have to provide hard evidence that it helps your business. Good People, I am not sure that I have benefitted from any special consideration, and my small voice on it is based on hard evidence that most current US systems are not fair to minorities and women. It is not about giving opportunities to the unqualified, it is simply giving “ACCESS” to the excluded.
Careers are about access. Some people will be fine to exclude and keep the status quo as it is. But if there is a small policy that demands at least 2% for the others, how is that bad? Some people posit that Obama got into Harvard Law via affirmative action (not sure how they could know), and I have a question for them: if he needed help to get in , do you think that the system is FAIR and blind since he finished close to top of the class (being the president of Harvard Law Review). In other words, a system that REJECTS a student who ended up among leaders in a class cannot be trusted to be balanced.
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And that is why this abolition of DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) is unfortunate? Companies like Walmart must understand that the stable state system is not fair to all, and asking companies to make space for those not on the table is not bad. The same goes for gender, asking for 2% of women-led companies does not mean they are not qualified; it is simply providing access to the excluded.
Many years ago while a student in Johns Hopkins, a student alluded that one could have entered via affirmative action. Quickly, I fired back explaining that my CGPA was 4/4 Masters and GRE Quantitative was 800/800, and those must possibly be better than hers. She froze! That student spent 9 years there and did not graduate.
Sure, the fact that people can get in via affirmative action diminishes the accomplishments of minorities who do not need one. But that is a smaller price to pay than removing that “fudge factor” which adjusts for an imperfect system. Companies should not take down DEI; I write this as an employer of labour who does not need any job from any!
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