Why the rumours of DEI’s death are greatly exaggerated

If you read the headlines, you probably think that DEI – that’s diversity, equity, and inclusion – is on its way out. But I have a truth for you: the rumours of DEI’s death are greatly exaggerated. 

It’s true that some companies are divesting from DEI, but those companies never really cared in the first place (but were happy to get some flattering PR). For companies that authentically care about ensuring that people from all backgrounds are treated fairly and given equitable opportunity, they’re recommitting and reinvesting in what’s been working. Why? Simply because while the status quo is currently the easy approach, incentives are shifting rapidly. 

The pressure is ramping up

Just last week, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) released the complete dataset on the gender pay gap for Australian companies with greater than 100 employees. 

For the first time, companies aren’t incentivised to say that they “care about DEI”: they’ll have to answer direct questions from employees and candidates about what they’re doing to ensure fair pay across their organisations. 

Questions about other aspects of fairness – from unbiased performance reviews to equitable time to promotion and how development opportunities are doled out – won’t be far behind. 

And here’s something that shouldn’t be a secret: re-designing workplaces to work well for people beyond the usual suspects isn’t rocket science. That’s not to say that it’s easy, but it’s much more straightforward than the naysayers would have you believe. 

Trust me: I’ve spent the last 9 years helping some of Australia’s biggest startups go from intention to reality when it comes to improving the representation of people from marginalised identities. From scaling Atlassian’s DEI program as they grew to more than 4,000 employees to building an equity and inclusion function at Culture Amp that’s fundamentally transformed their workforce, I’ve simply learned that there are no secrets to this work: it’s all about leadership being willing to invest the resources that align with the commitments they’ve made and actually listening to employees about their experience. That’s pretty much it.

What our journey looks like

This week, Culture Amp’s gender pay gap was released. 

At 5.2%, we have the smallest gap amongst our unicorn tech peers, and that gap is largely driven by our representation of women within our R&D roles (36%). Internally, we’d say that we’re not there yet, but we’re also proud of the fact that more than a third of technical team members identify as women or non-binary when the industry standard is in the teens at best. That progress didn’t happen by accident, but the key is simple: we’ve invested in women (shout out to this year’s International Women’s Day theme). 

That investment has started with redesigning and rigorously auditing our performance, promotion, and pay processes. Twice a year, we audit these programs from seven dimensions of identity (and intersectional ones where we have sufficient data) to look at fairness between groups. Where the math suggests that there is structural inequity, our team of HR business partners conducts investigations to understand what’s driving the pattern, and works with our leaders to re-evaluate areas where we think that bias may have crept in. We don’t close the process until our audits show that we’ve achieved structural equity. This very back office work isn’t the most exciting part of our investment, but it is the most important. 

After (yes, after) we implemented processes that give us confidence we’re building an environment in which people will be treated fairly, our Talent Acquisition team has worked intensely to source incredible candidates from marginalized backgrounds for our open roles. They’ve dedicated themselves to ensuring that our hiring managers have balanced slates of candidates to consider, that we have consistent processes that mitigate unconscious bias, and that candidates have the opportunity to understand the wide range of benefits and communities they’ll have access to as a part of our team. We’ve put specific muscle into identifying women for our Engineering leadership roles, and are proud that 44.8% of our Directors and above in Engineering identify that way. 

But even with those structural investments, everything doesn’t work perfectly. And that’s where listening comes in. Every quarter, our team runs an engagement survey (yes, with Culture Amp) that we intentionally analyse by demographics. Last year, we discovered that our highest-performing female engineers were significantly less motivated – and therefore less likely to stay – than their male peers. Upon seeing the data, our Engineering leadership and HR business partners jumped into action. Our data showed us that “career development” was the most important factor for this cohort, and so we initiated conversions to understand what that meant for each person. Then, our team invested: we provided a significant portion of our learning and development resources to give these engineers what was meaningful to them, whether that was a training opportunity, access to leadership, or coaching (for example). The result? Within a quarter, we saw a 17 percentage point jump in that group’s motivation, all because we simply listened and responded to what we heard. 

It’s these steps – that we will keep repeating – that will help us achieve and maintain the public commitments we’ve made to equity. There aren’t any shortcuts, but there aren’t really any secrets either. 

If we can, you can

What I hope is obvious by now is that what we’re doing isn’t something that in an ideal world would top the list of the world’s most innovative. But that’s the point. What we’ve done is straightforward: made a commitment, invested to make that commitment a reality, and done the work to hold ourselves continuously accountable for moving towards our aspirations. 

I wish that for everyone this International Women’s Day. For those with access and power, I wish for you to have the courage and conviction to invest the resources into women – especially those who are intersectionality marginalised – that’s required to ensure we have equitable access to opportunity. And for those of us who are holding the powerful accountable, we stop asking “Do you care about DEI?” and start asking “Where does DEI fall on your priority list, and how are you resourcing it accordingly?”

Aubrey Blanche-Sarellano is the founder of The Mathpath and VP of equitable operations at Culture Amp.