DEI Is Not DOA, Part 1

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Bo Young Lee: So when they start talking about the work of DEI, people are like, oh, that's what it is? I totally support it. But when you've created this boogeyman called DEI, unknown, scary DEI that people are claiming create reverse racism-- even though reverse racism and reverse discrimination aren't things-- that's what people are really reacting towards right now.

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Jill Finlayson: Welcome to the Future of Work podcast with Berkeley Extension and EDGE in Tech at the University of California, focused on expanding diversity and gender equity in tech.

EDGE in Tech is part of the Innovation Hub at CITRIS, The Center for IT Research in the Interest of Society, and the Banatao Institute. UC Berkeley Extension is the continuing education arm of the University of California at Berkeley. We're diving into a topic today that's more urgent than ever, the current state of diversity, equity, and inclusion in organizations, and the profound impact that artificial intelligence is having on these initiatives.

Over the past few years, many companies made bold commitments to DEI, promising to diversify their workforces, close equity gaps, and build more inclusive cultures. However, as economic pressures mount, budgets tighten, and politics change, a concerning trend is emerging. Organizations are scaling back their DEI initiatives. These pullbacks are raising alarms about what the future of work will look like, especially for underrepresented groups.

And then, when you add in the impact of companies adopting artificial intelligence in order to streamline operations and make decisions, the risk of algorithmic bias becomes even more pronounced. To have an open discussion about this, we're delighted to welcome Bo Young Lee, a globally recognized workplace and AI ethics, DEI, and ESG executive, and widely sought-after public speaker and leadership coach.

Bo serves as president of research and advisory for anitab.org, the leading mission-driven organization advancing women and nonbinary technologists. Prior to her role at anitab.org, Bo served as Uber technology's first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, where she was tasked to lead the total transformation of the company's culture, values, and environment of equity. Bo has helped hundreds of companies worldwide during her 24 years of DEI work, but was currently pursuing a master's of study in AI, ethics, and society at the University of Cambridge, Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence in the UK, and has an MBA with distinction from New York University's Stern School of Business, and a BA Magna Cum Laude from the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Welcome, Bo.

Bo Young Lee: It's a delight to be here. Thank you so much for taking the time to have this very meaningful and important conversation.

Jill Finlayson: It's the right time and there's a lot going on. So let's talk about where we are. There have been many headlines of late. They range from DEI is dying to DEI is dead, some may even say dead on arrival, while others say DEI is not actually dead. What is happening and how did we get here?

Bo Young Lee: So I think it's really important to understand what's happening in this moment, right? Regardless, if we take out all the noise that's there, fundamentally, we have to understand that we live in a diverse society. That is a given fact. The United States is a diverse country, and no matter what policy changes we make, it will still remain to be. If you look at Gen Z and the Generation Alpha that's coming after there, Gen Z is the first generation where white people do not make up a super majority. It's about 50% white. The remaining community are Black and other people of color, and a whole range of diverse people.

And then you look at Gen Alpha, and actually, Gen Alpha may be-- we're still in the midst of Gen Alpha-- may actually be the first generation where we don't see any majority in the United States, where it becomes a plurality of different people. So we have to accept that the country is diverse. When you have a state of diversity, you can make one of two choices. You can either choose to try to ignore that diversity, suppress it-- which is what we're seeing right now in the current political and social atmosphere-- and it's been studied. You end up creating greater tension and greater chaos. And I think that what we're seeing, that discomfort everybody's feeling right now is a byproduct of that movement to try to suppress some of the diversity that we know is inherently there.

The other choice, when you live in a diverse society is to say, hey, how do we make this diversity work? How do we make sure that everybody has a voice and that society is fundamentally working for everybody equally so that we get the best outcomes? And so that's the bigger context we're trying to, as a society, determine which path are we going to go down? Are we going to try to ignore this and then, like, allow for those chaotic tendencies to just thrive? Or are we going to continue on our path, which we've done as a country for more than half a century, of saying, we got to make this work somehow.

And so regardless of whether or not people are trying to cancel diversity, equity, and inclusion, we still have to do the work. And so I think sometimes, we get so focused in on the small things. And I know it's really crazy to call, like, presidential executive orders small, right? Because they're not at all. They have real implications. But I think we sometimes get so focused on the trees that we forget the larger context by which we're living in.

As somebody who's been doing this work for a really long time, I'm very optimistic that regardless of what happens in this very moment, the need for people to continue to create fairness, to create justice, to create equity in our society, is going to be there.

Jill Finlayson: I'm glad to hear your optimistic because it's a difficult time for that. And the irony here is that this is a time when borders are going away. We have more international teams, we have more cross-border distributed teams around the world. So why do you think that this is happening, given that people seem to, in general, be supportive of inclusion?

Bo Young Lee: I think a lot of it has to do with the weaponization that we see. Like, we've seen this happen before. People even knew that there was an acronym called DEI, right? We saw it happening with critical race theory, CRT. You would go out there and you'd see individuals going, do you know what critical race theory is? And people didn't know, but they certainly knew that they didn't like CRT.

And so a lot of the backlash right now, it's a very psychological one. And it's one rooted in fear, fear exacerbated by people who are in leadership. And I think that's where the backlash is really coming from, because when you start talking to people about what diversity, equity, and inclusion actually looks like, people are highly supportive. People love short term and long term disability leave. People love paid parental leave, especially both for women and maternity leave, but also for paternity leave. People love things like flexible work arrangements, working remotely. They love all those things. And those are all things that diversity, equity, and inclusion have been championing for decades.

So when they start talking about the work of DEI, people are like, oh, that's what it is? I totally support it. But when you've created this boogeyman called DEI, that unknown, scary DEI that people are claiming create reverse racism-- even though reverse racism and reverse discrimination aren't things-- that's what people are really reacting towards right now.

Jill Finlayson: I like your point. Reverse racism doesn't exist. Reverse discrimination doesn't exist. There's just discrimination.

Bo Young Lee: Yeah, I've had to make this point so many times. Somebody will come to me and they go, well, what if I'm a white man and someone tells me you didn't get the job because you're a white man? I always say, that's not reverse racism. That's not reverse discrimination, that's just discrimination. It's all discrimination. And if you look back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which is the law that really cemented in the fact that you can't discriminate in the workplace, it doesn't say, you can't discriminate against women, you can't discriminate against Black people, you can't discriminate against a German. It doesn't say that. What it says is that there are certain classes that you can't discriminate based on.

So you can't discriminate against someone based on their gender, whether it's woman, man, or they/them. You can't discriminate on that. You can't discriminate based on somebody's race and ethnicity. So if you don't get a job because you're white and someone tells you that and you know that that's a decision, that is race-based discrimination and that should be pursued. And that should be outlawed as much as any other race-based. But we know that in our society, the communities that have always been historically marginalized are the ones that are more likely to be targeted by unfair, unjust, prejudiced systems.

Jill Finlayson: Where is this fear coming from? Is change just happening too fast? What makes it so uncomfortable?

Bo Young Lee: The reason why there is so much fear and backlash and tension is that our society is becoming more polarized, and it's also becoming more polarized from a socioeconomic. The richer people are getting richer, but that richer group is getting smaller, and then everyone else it feels like is getting left behind. And so that economic tension that people feel, that economic scarcity that people are feeling, that's being exploited to make people scapegoat other groups that have no responsibility in people being left behind.

Jill Finlayson: So this is that the pie is only a specific size. And if somebody takes a bigger slice of pie, I'm going to have less pie?

Bo Young Lee: Exactly. And I've always said that diversity, equity, inclusion is not even trying to throw the pie because we know that fundamentally, the pie that we have right now isn't a great one. It was designed for a very specific to privilege and advance a certain very small sector of the society. And this is usually people who come from privilege to begin with. They come from wealth. They come from deep educational backgrounds. Their parents went to Harvard and their grandparents went to Harvard. And they get to go to Harvard.

And that's who the pie is being baked for. And so everyone else is being left behind. Nobody is really advocating for individuals who have never had power. And unfortunately, the greatest level, the tagline that some people use, obviously, is they say make America great again. And then they oftentimes refer back to the 1950s and 1960s.

And I always remind people, it's like, the thing that made America so great during that period of time wasn't the fact that there was a single monocultural that was defined by a certain racial/ethnic group. It was the fact that we had a upper tax rate of 90% for the richest Americans. And the 1950s and '60s saw some of the greatest redistribution of wealth in the United States. And we saw some of the smallest economic gaps in our society.

And we have left that era, right? We have so departed from that time and that. But it was that level of equity we had in society that made people feel really safe and very generous on top of it.

Jill Finlayson: So it did have some basis in truth that there was something better going on then. But as we know, that was not a great time for certain populations. And so how do we rationalize what was happening there versus the reality for many people?

Bo Young Lee: There actually was never a period of time when we were all unified as a society in that way. There was this cohort of, like, suburban/urban individuals who may have had that same-- listened to the same music, had all the same cultural checkpoints, all read the New York Times every single day, and so forth. But back then, one of the things is that there were all these other stories that were happening in the background, right?

We know that the Black communities in the United States had a very different narrative. We know that people who were new immigrants had a very different story, but there was no way to democratize the storytelling at that time. And the one thing that we're seeing today is that we can have a huge debate about social media and the way in which social media may further polarize the society and whatnot. But one thing that social media has done is it has democratized the storytelling process.

Anyone with a camera, anyone with a phone, anyone with computer access, they could tell their story. And there's that opportunity, that democratized opportunity for anybody's story to go viral. And so I think that is something that is really making people feel uncomfortable, is that they're being told stories that they've never seen before, that they've never heard before, and they think those stories are new.

What they don't realize is they're not, right? People see the abuse of Black and Brown people, and they're like, we never had these problems before. And you're like, absolutely, these problems existed before. Police have been targeting and racially profiling Black and Brown people for centuries. You just didn't know about it.

But now we can't ignore it, and that's making you uncomfortable. People have said, oh, DEI is this newfangled thing and it's used to oppress certain populations, white people, cisgender, Christian, and so forth. And I keep reminding people, no, the work of diversity, equity, inclusion began decades ago. I've been doing this work for 24 years. But even before then, the earliest stages of DEI-- if we're going to label it-- began in the 1960s after the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

You saw companies starting to hire affirmative rights, affirmative action managers, equal employment managers. The very first ERT was founded, I believe, at Xerox in the late 1960s. I think it was like 1968 or 1967. That was the very first employee resource group. And it really began with a Black employee seeing another Black employee going, oh, my god, another one of you exists here. Let's go have lunch. And that happened. And then employee resource groups started growing from there. They started existing. And that was ultimately what became the modern iteration of DEI.

Jill Finlayson: And I think this is a good time to define those terms. Before DEI became just a catchphrase like "woke" and became demonized.

Bo Young Lee: Absolutely. So diversity is not an identity. I say this over and over again. You oftentimes hear people say, we need more diverse people. And I always say, define what diverse people mean to you. And I would say diversity isn't identity. It's a state of being. So as an individual, I, myself, I'm Bo Young Lee. I'm a woman. I'm Korean-American. I'm an immigrant. I'm all these things and those are aspects of who I am. But alone, I'm just one individual and I'm not diverse.

Diversity is a state of being where you have two or more people, you have a group of individuals, and you look for the places where you have differences and you have similarity. In most corporate environments, I am pretty diverse from an identity perspective, but I'm not diverse from a educational perspective. I have two university degrees. I'm getting a third one right now. They're all pretty good schools, so there's no diversity from an educational background perspective that I bring but I bring a lot of other identity diversity.

So that's what diversity is. It's simply looking for where we have differences, where we have similarities, and where are the gaps in terms of difference.

Jill Finlayson: I believe a lot of the research has shown that having diverse points of view increases diversity of thought, better solutions, better decisions, less blind spots, better revenue. So if there's data that supports diversity driving those kind of outcomes, why are we seeing that word suddenly sound bad?

Bo Young Lee: You're right. All the research shows not only a correlated relationship to diversity on a team and better outcomes, but a causal relationship, meaning that literally having more diverse people in a group, in a team, in a business, causes there to be better outcomes, because diverse teams can focus and see different risks as well as different opportunities.

Diverse teams can better assess a situation. Diverse teams simply challenge each other more. And when you challenge an idea-- and everybody knows this-- you typically end up with a better idea. If you bring a bunch of diverse people into a room but only the people who have always had majority power have a voice, if they're the only ones listened to, you're still not going to get the benefit from that diversity. You need to have the inclusion where you have systems in place, where you have behavioral values that allow you to say, hey, half the room are women, but the women haven't spoken up in the last 20 minutes. Are we intentionally or unintentionally shutting their voices out?

And so you have to have the inclusion to make sure that you're getting the most value out of it. And then finally, you get the E, the equity, which is the newest friend in this DEI journey. You can have the diverse people in a room. You can have inclusive voices. But if fundamentally, everything you're designing still results in really deeply inequal outcomes, what's the purpose of the first two? And that's where equity in the last few years have become part of this conversation.

But I think people oftentimes just focus on the diversity. They don't think about the inclusion. They don't think about the equity and what we're trying to actually create. They just say, oh, they're just trying to hire, like, 10 women. And you're like, no, that's not what we're just trying to do.

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, so the journey from diversity to inclusion, and then people talk of course, about belonging, you're not just in the room, but you belong in the room. Your voice has value which requires psychological safety, meaning that you can say what you think without fear of retribution. And so there's this whole path that requires everyone's participation to really get the outcomes that diversity can bring.

I recall you've said that equity was a difficult thing to undertake because it was so big. Can you say a little bit more about that?

Bo Young Lee: Yeah, I have to admit, like, so first and foremost, I always tell people, I am very agnostic about language. I try not to get, like, overly specific or precious about it. When I was first hired at Uber, they asked me what I wanted my title to be, and I was like chief diversity and inclusion officer? I'm like, I guess. And people had called on me to add equity even when I first took that job back in 2018, and I actually pushed back against it. Because to your point, equity is such a huge concept. What does equity really mean? Does that mean we're paying people the same way? Are we giving people the same opportunities?

Most companies hire folks that already had some work experience. That means that they've already come through a system that was probably not the most equitable. Therefore, you're going to get a woman who's had the exact same number of years of work experience versus a man, but she might be leveled very differently. She might be one or two levels down because their system was not particularly equitable and inclusive.

Do we just accept that that's the level she's coming in as a senior associate versus a man with the exact same number of years is coming in as a manager? Do we just accept that and then slot them in accordingly? Or do we try to adjust for what we know is an inequitable system, and try to level the woman up to the same level as the man? Is that what equity looks like? So there are so many factors that go into equity.

I'm a very practical person and I like to have impact. And I said, I don't know that I want the responsibility of equity because equity is not just something that a single organization owns. It's something that is highly dependent on the society in which you thrive in. I was sort of convinced to start focusing on equity because I basically said to somebody, if I'm going to add equity to my title, I'm going to define it in a very narrow way with factors that I, as a leader, and I as a corporate entity, can actually control, which are things like pay, which are things like making sure that promotion systems are equitable. But I never promised that I was going to solve for all inequity in society, because that's just an impossibility for any one institution to do.

Jill Finlayson: And I think that's an important point to make, which is that there are societal forces at play here. And so for those who have not heard the term systemic bias, what is the definition of systemic bias and how does that affect people's ability to access work?

Bo Young Lee: One individual can be deeply prejudiced about anything, right? They can be deeply prejudiced about certain genders or certain racial ethnic groups or certain socioeconomic backgrounds. They might be biased against somebody who went to public school and believe that people who went to private schools are better educated, more competitive intellectually. So everybody is prejudiced. But any one individual, the every-person on the street-- can only inflict so much harm.

Where that prejudice becomes truly dangerous is when very powerful people with prejudices then create systems with those prejudices already built in. And one of the most impactful examples of this is the way in which maternal discrimination is systematized and negatively impacts anybody, any woman with a child. So in the United States now, young women earn 60% of all undergraduate degrees and up to 70% of all graduate degrees.

So as a group of individuals, women are more highly educated than men in the United States. And this is not just a United States phenomena. We see this pretty much in all very economically developed countries where women are now earning more degrees. And you would think that those young women would then do well in the workplace. And for a while, they do.

But if we then move another few years after those young women have entered the workplace, you suddenly start seeing women falling off a cliff. And that cliff that women oftentimes fall off from both a career development perspective and promotion perspective, as well as from income earning, happens when women start to have children. You're starting to see slower rates of promotion and that's because our society has said women who have children are less committed to their jobs, and we've created systems to punish women once they start having children. And you start to see women just falling out of the workplace because of the systematic biases that we have built and systematic discrimination that we have built.

And so one manager can be very biased against the woman. And he can have maybe influence, like, five women in his entire career and hold them back, let's say. But if you create a system where promotions are dependent on working a certain way or working in a certain style, or not taking time off or not working flexibly, that then becomes a systematic barrier that limit women who have children from advancing in their career.

And so that's the difference between just a prejudice and then having systematic bias. So you have prejudice, then ultimately, when you build that prejudice into a system, you get systematic injustice and systematic bias. And then that leads ultimately to what we call epistemic injustice, which basically means that the way the knowledge that we're creating, the knowledge that we're putting out into the universe, doesn't represent the diversity of the society we live in.

There's less information. And a great example of this is from a medical perspective, right? There is far less information about how disease, how drugs interact and impact women's health, less information about how disease impacts people of color, Black people. That knowledge simply doesn't exist.

And a great example of this is that a British medical student who noticed that when he was studying disease and disease manifestation, not a single example in his textbook used dark skin to illustrate what disease looks like. So the very first textbook on how disease manifests in darker-skinned people was not published until 2020 and was published by a Black medical student, not by a professor of dermatology or whatever.

And so when you start to remove opportunity for people and that representation doesn't exist, so when there aren't women in science and technology and in the computer science world, when there aren't people of color, they don't then get to create knowledge that is very important for all of us to understand. That's why women have far worse outcomes from cardiovascular perspective, because women experience heart attacks differently and doctors aren't trained on that difference.

They don't test dosage on women in clinical trials. Everything is dosed to a man. And so women are being given dosages of medicine that might not work for them because they don't test it. It leads to this ultimately epistemic injustice. And we haven't even as a society really understood the full extent of that level of injustice there.

Jill Finlayson: I wanted to define one more term. Talk about the word "meritocracy".

Bo Young Lee: First and foremost, most people don't know the history of the term "meritocracy". The term "meritocracy" was coined in 1956 by a British sociologist. And it was coined as a pejorative, as a criticism against the then British system of testing children in very early ages and then slotting them into either an academic track of study or tracking them towards a much more vocational track. That was happening.

And so a sociologist said, this system is wrong. It is a meritocracy. And the meritocracy that he described was something that superficially looks fair but is fundamentally, deeply unfair. The term, then, "meritocracy" was further lambasted in a book called The Rise of the Meritocracy by Michael Young, another sociologist who basically explores a system that was designed to be superficially equitable but deeply inequitable.

Unfortunately, that term "meritocracy" has lost that pejorative aspect, has lost the ironic critical aspect of it, and it has been now adopted, co-opted by individuals who believe that we can really create these systems based purely on merit, on someone's ability, someone's education, someone's intellect.

Jill Finlayson: So, Bo, you just sort of demonstrated that meritocracy did not come from a good place. It had a very different meaning. Now people see it as this beacon of something that they want to go to. What has to happen in order for us to get there?

Bo Young Lee: I'm not opposed to a system based on merit. But if we're going to build a system based on merit, we have to ensure that first, there's equity. So many great thinkers, philosophers-- John Rawls being one of the great legal philosophers of the 20th century, he basically said, if you're going to really try and work towards building a society that is merit-based, fundamental to that is ensuring that you have a society that is equitable and just and fair. And if you don't have that fairness, if you don't have that equality, then there's no ability to create a merit-based society because you're just building bad upon bad, inequitable upon inequitable.

If we're not addressing the fact that there is unequal access to educational resources, that there are prejudices in our society and we're not addressing them, merit is impossible. So I would say, if you're truly committed to meritocracy, you've got to make sure that there's fairness. And I think people oftentimes forget that relationship.

One of the things that John Rawls says is in order to truly build just system, you have to start with the premise that the people building it don't know what they're going to be assigned in that society. So if I were to go to a group of people and say, OK, you 10 people, you create an idealized, merit-based society, but you don't know if you're going to be born a man or a woman. You don't know if you're going to be born white, Black, Asian. You don't know if you're going to be born with a disability or different abilities. You don't know.

You might be put into this game as an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala. So create a system that is as equal and fair as possible. That is the only way that we know that we can be assured that a system is fair, if you don't know where you're going to start. Now, of course, this is all an intellectual exercise, but that's where you have to start.

So I would argue based on that, that no person who comes from an identity that has historically had power can ever truly create a meritocratic system because they can't strip themselves of the privilege that they've had their entire life.

Jill Finlayson: I think that's the challenge, right? Who defines merit? Who defines what are the qualifications for a job? I've heard it referred to as mirror-tocracy. I'm looking for people who look like me or have been trained like I have or have had work experience like I've had. How do we get to more objective criteria?

Bo Young Lee: Yeah. So I think a lot of organizations, they're looking for very simple, practical things that they can do. And they are like, if we run unconscious bias training or if we simply, like, set a quota, we're going to be able to create equity. But that hyper focus and desire for simple best practice policies will never actually solve inequity within an organization, and it will never actually allow organizations to create true merit-based systems.

So I'm a big stickler for analytics. People always ask me, well, where do you start? And I always say, start with the data. Collect as much data as you can and try to analyze that data in as many iterations as you can. And so for promotion as an example, a lot of organizations will look at simply like the outcome of promotions. How many women were promoted? How many men were promoted?

But I like to go a step further. Rather than just seeing how many men or how many women were being promoted, I asked the question, how long did it take those individuals to get promoted? So if it takes a woman 3 and 1/2 years to get promoted to a manager versus men 2.1 years to get promoted to manager, even if the rates of promotion are similar, we still have inequity, because why is it taking women 3.8 years versus men 2.1? And there's a lot of different reasons.

One, you can simply say men are more competent than women and that's why they get promoted faster. But that conversation of men are more competent and work harder defies what we see coming out of universities, right? We know that women are earning the majority of university degrees, the majority of graduate school degrees. We know that women are not only getting the majority, but they're also graduating at the top of their class.

So why is it then that women are doing so well up to a point in time, and then suddenly, they fall off the cliff when they join a corporation? Is it that corporations are just more rigorous than the educational process? Doubtful. It has to do with the fact that the systems in organizations are designed to bias towards a certain set of behaviors, a certain set of appearances, a certain set of networking and communication styles that are still very oriented towards men and masculine culture and masculine engagement.

And that is the reason why we're starting to see women falling off the cliff. And then that extra layer of analysis, how long does it take for people to get promoted? What percentage of people who are eligible for promotion actually get promoted? Are we seeing higher ratios for men than for women? That is where you start to do the actual work itself. And so I always say to people, if you're really, truly interested in diversity, equity, and inclusion, don't look for best practices. Never ask the question of best practice. Ask the question, what does the data begin to tell us?

Jill Finlayson: Yeah, thank you for talking about data. A lot of DEI programs, there's a lot of different types of programs out there. Data is one and employee resource groups is another. Trainings is another. What types of programs are you seeing out there and what kind of data do we have about their effectiveness?

Bo Young Lee: A few years ago, Harvard Business School ran some research and they wanted to see what DEI related initiatives have the greatest impact for change. First and foremost, I think it validated the fact that training has minimal to no impact on outcomes in an organization. And training is oftentimes where people like to begin because it's really easy. There's lots of off-the-shelf options. There's lots of independent consultants who will train you on almost any topic related to unconscious bias and whatnot, but training has very limited.

So for me as a DEI professional, that correlates very much to my experience. I don't like training. I run it very rarely and only for very specific reasons. But what the research actually found was that the single biggest influence on whether or not an organization makes any kind of progress is actually having a senior leader at the C-suite who holds the organization accountable for transformation. And you actually did see-- coming out of 2020 and that huge rush to commit to diversity and inclusion-- you saw a huge creation of new diversity, equity, inclusion leadership. And I know we're doing this in recording, so I just did some air quotes, "leadership" roles in diversity, equity, and inclusion.

And if the Harvard research shows that it is having a senior leader at the table, then all these companies should have made progress, and almost none of them actually did. And there's a reason for that, right? First and foremost, most of the roles that were created coming out of 2020 into 2021, they were never positioned for success. A lot of the roles were actually labeled chief diversity officer roles, but I know for a fact because I had a lot of companies actually reach out to me during that time, that a lot of them were at a very mid-level of leadership, senior manager to maybe senior director at best.

And having done this work and having done it at the C-suite, having done it at different levels, you can't influence when you're a middle manager. You cannot go up to a senior leader and say, you're doing this wrong when you are 2, 3, 4 levels down, especially within the tech industry and especially within Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is, of all the industries I've ever worked for, one of the most hierarchical industries I've ever worked in, and one where there's huge levels of power distance.

So in Silicon Valley in particular, if you're not leveled at least at a vice president to senior vice president level, you're not going to make that influence, right? So I think one of the things that we saw coming out of 2020 is that a lot of roles were created, but they were not leveled at the right level and they were not set up for success.

So why did that Harvard research then say that it was senior leaders? And it's because a lot of the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion isn't just about creating new systems. It isn't just about analyzing the data. It is being able to hold leaders accountable and actually go and talk to them and coach them and help them address their unconscious biases, help them. Because no matter what system you have in place, no matter what programmatic changes you make, the greatest single thing that influences how people behave in an organization is how the leadership behaves.

Jill Finlayson: All right. I'm going to put you on the spot here. I'm going to say if you were the right hand person to Mark Zuckerberg, who recently said his company needed more masculine energy when the majority of his tech workforce is male, or you've got Elon Musk saying empathy is a weakness of our country and we shouldn't be empathetic-- yet this is a core competency that every leader should have-- you're standing next to them. Where do you begin?

Bo Young Lee: Well, first and foremost, to Mark Zuckerberg, who said that we need more masculine energy-- and we know the data for Meta is out there. I would say, like, your company is over 70% male. And you're saying that you need more masculine energy. So are you indirectly implying that the men in your organization are somehow emasculated? Like, is that the implication? Because your organization is already a majority male.

And if you want more masculine, what's the right number? 80%? 90%? 95%? What aspect of masculine? Because masculinity is not unidimensional, right? We know that there are multiple dimensions of masculinity. We have very, very typical patriarchal masculinity, top-down vertical power, yelling, screaming. You have much more holistic aspects of masculinity that are displayed by leaders like Tim Walz, for example. He introduced a very different model of masculinity, or the classic example, Mr. Rogers from Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. He was a very gentle form of masculinity.

Define to me what you're looking for. That would be my starting place. And I think for me in particular, I tend to be a pretty cheeky person. I tend to also be very confident in my own ability, so I'm happy to go up to a leader going, well, you're kind of an idiot, aren't you? In the nicest way possible, but yeah, I have gone up to leaders going, you know that thing you did? That wasn't OK. That was not OK. And then they'll be like, why? What did I do wrong? And then I'll get into detail.

I would challenge that basic assumption. And then I would say to Elon Musk, I said to somebody once, like, somebody asked me-- they're like, if Tesla ever came to you and said, would you be our chief diversity officer? I would say, absolutely if I get to report directly to the board and not to Elon. And they're like, really? Why would you take that job? And I go, first and foremost, I love making change and I love a good challenge. And so there's nothing bigger, probably, in Silicon Valley than Tesla.

But also, I would look forward to sitting across from Elon Musk going, like, empathy is a weakness. And I go, you ask for empathy every single day when you bring up your autism. You have blamed your autism for so many of the behaviors that people have found most problematic, and you do that because you're asking people to be empathetic towards your autism. But you don't display it for any other dimension.

And I'm somebody who's neurodivergent. I'm dyslexic, and I would love for people to be empathetic towards me, but I know that they're not always. And so I would say to him, like, why do you expect something that nobody else expects, that you don't offer to anybody else? Like, if you think empathy is a weakness, stop bringing up your autism because I don't care then, if empathy is a weakness. I would just turn it back on him and say, like, why do you ask for it if you're not willing to offer it?

Jill Finlayson: And on the bigger picture, these people run big companies. They're some of the companies that are reacting most dramatically to the administration guidance. They're doing return to work. They're eliminating DEI departments. They're doing all of these things. Can we talk about why companies are reacting this way? You also mentioned boards. We know that the board at Apple and the board at Costco were like, keep those DEI programs. Not even close, right? The majority.

So why are we seeing such different reactions from companies and what are they risking if they do roll back DEI?

Bo Young Lee: It's so interesting. A lot of organizations right now, I think they are rushing to try to comply to these executive orders-- which, by the way, a few weeks ago, a federal judge stated very clearly that the three executive orders that were explicitly around corporate diversity, equity, inclusion are illegal, that they are a violation of First Amendment rights by companies to be able to do what they think is the best for the organization.

But companies are falling over themselves to try to comply to these laws. And I think it's not simply that they want to be compliant, because we actually know that companies have never been really compliant for a lot of workplace related laws. I think it is that they have a belief that there is now a leadership in our country that is extremely biased, that is extremely retaliatory, and they don't want to be on anybody's bad list.

What a sad state of affairs, that we're even in this situation. But at the same time, I've been talking to a lot of companies and I've said, when in the history of workplace diversity, equity, inclusion, have companies rallied to comply this quickly? And I use the example of the Americans with Disability Act. So the Americans with Disability Act was passed in 1989. It's a law that is over 35 years old now.

And still, to this day, some companies will fight tooth and nail to not comply to the aspects of the Americans with Disability Act that require organizations to offer reasonable accommodations for people with disabilities. The Americans with Disability Act was written intentionally by the lawmakers to both be very broad and unspecific.

So if you read the ADA, it does not say this set of conditions are disabilities. They just kind of say disabilities, right? And it was left to the courts to decide, OK, what are the disabilities that should require accommodation? And then they just said reasonable accommodation, but they never defined that and again, left it up to the courts.

Well, basically, corporations interpreted the ADA to say, like, I don't have to offer any. And every single amount of progress we've made using the ADA has come through, like, a huge body of case law. People with disabilities taking their employers to court for the most basic accommodations for, can I have a chair when I'm pregnant so I don't have to stand the whole entire time? Can I get another job so I don't have to lift 50 pounds every single time? Can I get a different ergonomic setup for my desk?

All of that came through court. So employers have never really complied proactively. They've been sued to comply. And then you have this three executive orders around DEI. And companies are falling over themselves to comply in advance without any legal mandate for compliance.

Jill Finlayson: So what is legal now? What is illegal? I just saw a New York Times article that was published, a list of 199 words that the Trump administration is targeting, words like diversity and inclusion, but also things like bias, stereotypes, underrepresented, underserved, and many more words. They're flagging these words. They're removing them from websites. They're investigating, delaying, denying grants and funding. Is this about legality?

Bo Young Lee: No, it's not about legality at all. Right now, what was legal before January 20 is still legal to this day. People oftentimes turn to the Supreme Court case regarding affirmative action that took place, the decision that came out last year that banned the use of affirmative action in higher education. That decision was very specific to university admissions. That was it.

But right now, the exact same laws that were required before January 20 are in place. And the executive orders that were issued by the Trump administration, a judge has specifically said those are illegal. You cannot ban private companies from doing work that is legal. And prior to January 20, you actually had the OFCCP that conducted audits of workforce data by federal contractors. And if they discovered an imbalance in the representation of people in certain facilities, in certain factories, in certain warehouses, they will require you-- and I've done this. I've done this for companies-- they will require you to create an affirmative action plan. And that's what it was called. That's what it is called.

You are required to work towards hiring and increasing representation based on the affirmative action. So there's a bit of a whiplash going on right now, because there are some companies that have been sued through class action lawsuits, and they have settled. And as part of their settlement, they have court mandated affirmative action and compliance-based activity that they are required to do, that they're still under mandate to comply with.

Jill Finlayson: So there's a risk of over-correction coming out on the wrong side of legality. What are we seeing, though, in terms of this chilling effect, even if it's not illegal?

Bo Young Lee: Yeah. So even if it's not illegal, we're seeing a lot of organizations wiping their websites of any diversity and inclusion language. We're starting to see organizations rebrand their entire initiative. So I've seen companies who have rebranded their diversity, equity, inclusion as colleague engagement, as listening and empowerment and whatever else. I've seen many different iterations.

And I think a lot of organizations, those in particular who have not explicitly come out with a PR statement saying we're rolling back our DEI, I've seen a lot of organizations try to get to a place where they can hide their activity. Because most organizations, I want to believe, engage in DEI, not so much the performative ones that happened in the last couple of years, but the organizations that have had decades, sometimes decades, of activity. They recognize that fundamentally, DEI is good for their business.

They know that they can hire more competitively, that they get the best talent when they have a focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Those organizations want to continue doing the work, but they no longer want attention for that work. And so they're trying to hide it in some ways.

And we're in a very unprecedented time right now. Nothing is normal right now. We've never seen leadership in our country use the platform to punish individual people and punish individual institutions. And so I understand some of the fear that's certainly there.

Jill Finlayson: It does seem rather Orwellian, telling people what words they can use, how they can talk about their work. Is there anything we can do to fight back on this list of terminology? Because these are good words. These accurately describe what we need to do.

Bo Young Lee: Not only are they good words, but they are objectively just words. Like, I know one of the words is obviously diversity. But how do you, as a scientist, for example, submit a grant into the NIH and talking about diversity of genome? Like, what alternative is there than the word diversity? Like, are you going to say we're going to look at differences in genome pattern versus diversity of genome? I guess that's what people are going to have to start doing.

Some of the terminology they're using, I can see why they're attacking it. We know that, for example, especially in the diversity, equity, and inclusion space, I have moved towards using the phrase pregnant people because I recognize that there are transgender people who are fully capable of getting it. And I will say people with uteruses. That is language that I choose to use because it signals who I am.

But I also use that language knowing that it could trigger other individuals who don't align with me philosophically. And so I understand why they have weaponized some of that language. But there are words there that are simply nomenclature. Like, you're not supposed to say pregnancy, even. I think pregnancy, the word pregnant is on there. I'm like, breastfeeding is on there. Something like gender affirming is on there.

And I'm just like, the term gender affirming is such an interesting term. And the idea of gender affirming care is such an interesting idea, right? People have such a problem with gender affirming care when it comes to transgender people. I always tell people the bulk of gender affirming care goes towards cisgender people who identify as the sex they were assigned at birth. I'm like, do you recognize that the vast majority of hormone replacement therapy goes towards women and men?

A lot of men who are middle aged, a lot of women who are middle aged who are going through that change in life, get so much benefit from hormone replacement therapy. The hormone treatment that transgender people get is a tiny sliver, because transgender people make up less than 1% of our population. I try to tell people, I'm like, the vast majority of breast implants go towards cisgender women, and that is gender affirming care.

And Viagra is gender affirming care for cisgender men. And we see this over and over again. When a minority community gets attacked, it will have a reverberating negative implication to all of us.

Jill Finlayson: Absolutely. And I think that is a really critical point, is that this doesn't just harm the marginalized community. This harms everyone. It changes all of these rules and definitions, which kind of leads us back to this whole systemic rules. And so if these rules get into artificial intelligence, what are we going to see?

Bo Young Lee: I mean, we're seeing it right now already. We know that, for example, if we look at generative AI, so the large language models that we're seeing like ChatGPT or Claude, or Grok 3 and so forth, we already know that there was a research paper not that long ago that shows that, for example, these large language models, they are more likely to judge a user as being uneducated if they use African-American Vernacular English.

How did a large language model learn that somehow, African-American Vernacular English is lower class or less educated than standard American English, for example? We know, for example, that agentic AI-- so AI agents that are built with very little to no human interaction-- be able to execute tasks. We know that helper AIs, for example, those that are meant to be assistants, are more likely to be anthropomorphized as women. And those agents that are decision making agents or creative agents like those that are created to write code, those are oftentimes anthropomorphized to be male.

And so one of the things that we're seeing right now from an artificial intelligence perspective, is that the same biases that we see in our larger society are now being exhibited on these artificial intelligence platforms. And the really problematic thing about this is we talk early on about the difference between one individual being biased versus a system being biased, right? The difference between systemic bias versus just individual prejudice.

Well, think about artificial intelligence as, like, a systematic bias on steroids. The level of quantifying capability of artificial intelligence surpasses humans by billions and trillions and gigs of difference. And so a bias that gets built, that is learned through the data that we use to program artificial intelligence, then is manifest over and over again. And I'll give you another really great example of this.

So there was a health care system that was created to help insurers and help hospitals determine what kind of care should be given and to whom. Well, the health care system that was created utilized historical data on health care utilization. And even though that the programmers of that algorithm and the system explicitly excluded race-- because they knew that there was so much racial bias in the US health care system-- even though they explicitly excluded race, what they found over time, is that that health care system persistently and consistently recommended lesser amounts of care for Black patients and more care for white patients because what the data showed is that Black patients get less care.

We have historically used less resources on Black patients, and we have historically used more for white patients. And so if you held all other factors and you just took out race, that same bias was still there. Even though in the United States, we know that Black people tend to get sicker because they have less access to preventative care, and doctors also tend to take their concerns less seriously, even though Black patients have worse outcomes, like have worse health statistics in the United States and therefore, should justifiably get more care, this health care artificial intelligence agent was recommending less.

And they were trying to control-- the programmers were actually trying to be good. They were like, we're going to control for race because we know that our system is racist. They still saw the same outcome because the system was already biased. And now it's like an artificial intelligence that hundreds of thousands of hospitals can use.

Jill Finlayson: And this is where that socioeconomic line comes into play as well. If you look at how much money people spend on health, well, wealthier people spend more money on health than poorer people. And so if you're going to extrapolate use and needs from that, you're obviously going to have a problem. This sounds like a whole other topic that we need to unpack. Would you mind coming back and talking just about how we're seeing changes in AI affect our behaviors in the real world, and how that's exacerbating some of these DEI concerns?

Bo Young Lee: I would love to.

Jill Finlayson: That would be amazing. Well, let me ask you one follow on question before we close out today. One of my colleagues, Professor John A. Powell from the Othering and Belonging Institute here at Cal, pointed out that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends toward justice. But he said it only bends if we bend it. So where do we go from here? What is your advice for people who are trying to fight the good fight in making sure that everybody feels like they belong at work?

Bo Young Lee: So I've always said that there are three components that you need to have in order to make change in the workplace. The first thing you need to have is you need to have data, which we already talked about. The second thing you need to have is you need to have leadership buy-in. If leaders aren't on board, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not going to make progress, right? So you've got to have those conversations with Mark Zuckerberg and with Elon Musk and with all these CEOs that are out there.

But the third thing you need to have-- and this is actually the most critical, but it's oftentimes the thing that's lacking-- is you need to have courage. The work takes courage, and it takes having hard conversations and doing things that make some people uncomfortable.

To add to John is the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. But you have to do something, and that thing is oftentimes only possible if you have the courage to do it. So I would say to individuals, have the courage to speak up. Have the courage to say something before it's too late and we're not allowed to say things.

Jill Finlayson: And I think it's great that people are having these conversations at town halls. We're seeing people boycotting Target and boycotting Amazon because they don't agree with their abandonment of these DEI principles. And so I think it's great to hear that we can have an influence when we oftentimes feel like we can't have influence.

Bo Young Lee: Absolutely. And I know we're wrapping things up here, but I'll just say, like, we saw when Apple took their DEI proposal to their shareholders, and we saw Costco. And to your point, their investors were like, nope, keep doing it because we know it's good for business, right? The irony in all of that is that last year, John Deere made a statement saying that they were rolling back some of their DEI. And they actually did take their proposal to their board afterwards, so very recently, after they made that statement that they were pulling back. And only 1.3% of their investors said you should pull back on DEI. Like, 98% of their investors said, no. DEI is good for us.

Had they just waited? Had they just waited to take the conversation to their investors, the proposal, they would have had a very different outcome, and their brand took a hit. Same thing for Target. I'm sure if Target had taken this to their investors, the investors would have been like, what do you mean? You've just spent the last 20 years building your brand on recognizing diverse communities, women, people of color, LGBTQ.

Your customer base is primarily Gen Z and Millennial women. And who supports DEI more than anybody? It's that community. So what I would say to organizations is, don't be rash. This is a moment in time in history. But at the end of the day, I am very optimistic that we'll always need diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Jill Finlayson: Thanks so much, Bo. This is a great place to pause as we unpack our current state of DEI. We look forward to having you back next month to continue this conversation and take a deeper dive into AI and its impact in the real world and on our behaviors. So stay tuned for more on this important and evolving topic. In the meantime, please share this with friends and colleagues who may be interested in taking this Future of Work journey with us, and make sure to check out extension.berkeley.edu to find a variety of courses to help you thrive in this new working landscape.

And to see what's coming up at EDGE in Tech, go ahead and visit edge.berkeley.edu. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll be back next month to continue our conversation. Until next time, The Future of Work podcast is hosted by Jill Finlayson, produced by Sarah Benzuly, edited by Matt Dipietro, Natalie Newman, and Alicia Liao.

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