Workers Are Sick of DEI

From Meta to Hollywood, companies are ditching the DEI. In Australia, though, boneheaded corporates still haven’t got the get woke; go broke message. Well, not entirely: some sports clubs are quietly ditching the much-loathed ‘Welcome to Country’ bullshit. Overall, though, too many Australian companies are spending too much time listening to whatever the dipshit communications graduate in HR tells them.

Word to the not-so-wise suits: just because Hermione Hyphenated-Surname read it on her Bluesky feed doesn’t mean that the rest of the workforce believes it. In fact, the strongest opposition to DEI comes from workers, not bosses.

Employee resistance to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives is rising in Australia as companies struggle to explain the rationale for them and the re-election of Donald Trump emboldens critics to voice their concerns.

Of course they have to find a way to pin it on the Bad Orange Man. In actual fact, workers’ loathing of DEI long predates the Second Coming of Trump.

Experts say Australian resistance to workplace diversity programs has been building for some time.

Diversity Council of Australia research published last February found 7 per cent of Australian workers opposed or strongly opposed diversity and inclusion programs at work – up from 3 per cent in 2017.

Big surprise, though: the DEI troughers just love their unearned leg-up.

Ashley McGrath, chief executive of members organisation CEOs for Gender Equity, a WA-based charity that aims to accelerate progress towards gender equality by helping CEOs lead from the top, said employee resistance, typically from men, was the No 1 barrier to progress across her member organisations.

Or maybe, just maybe, you’re not good enough to make it on merit alone?

Resistance to DEI initiatives was increasing for several key reasons, she said.

Programs had become more prominent and overt; companies had failed to bring men on the journey and convincingly explain the rationale; programs were often seen as a zero-sum game in which women gained all the benefits, and their broader benefits were ignored; and men who raised concerns often felt they were dismissed out of hand as bigots or misogynists.

She womansplained.

Backlash against the programs had been building for years as legislative change led to increased activity in the area and many employees did not understand why the programs existed.

“They exist because, over a number of decades, women and other underrepresented groups in the workplace have been overlooked for promotion and overlooked in hiring decisions, due to a number of structural and social barriers [and] due to [conscious and] unconscious discrimination and bias,” Ms Shaw said.

So, how does she explain the absolute dominance of women in fields such as healthcare and teaching? Are we going to see DEI programs forcing ‘gender equality’ in such lucrative fields as veterinary medicine?

Yeah, right: pull the other one.

They’ll do anything to keep their snouts firmly in the lady-troughs and snatch the men’s share as well.