For every job interview that led to an offer, I was a DEI hire. When I was a teacher with no experience, I was a DEI hire. I was a DEI hire when I took a job mid-career to mentor a new teacher. When I moved into higher education, I was a DEI hire. The recent news would make you think that DEI means I was unqualified, hired because of some physical attribute or to meet some quota. But, these employers were looking to diversify their workforce. In my opinion, this is a really good thing.

Looking at the team I work on currently, diversity, equity and inclusion are our strength. Working in a large organization, with faculty members from many different national origins, with extremely varied experiences, and different areas of expertise, the five people on my team often divvy up tasks. We do this based on our personal strengths, our unique understandings, or our relationships with faculty members which might be based on connections due to gender, race, class, or maybe just living in the same neighborhood. Having multiple perspectives, different understandings, varied expectations and being able to communicate those makes the team better as a whole. As Rock and Grant (2016) state in their review of significant research, “nonhomogenous teams are simply smarter.” Diversity of age in a team ensures that the work continues beyond the retirement of certain employees and that new team members are trained with more experienced employees. Diversity of culture and background ensure that bias and assumptions don’t take the work the wrong direction. Exposure to diversity has individual benefits, institutional benefits, and societal benefits for all people involved, not just the people we would label as ‘diverse’.

I understand the worry about unqualified people being hired, but when I hear people talk about this it often feels like over-identifcation, taking this idea personally when it doesn’t really involve them. There are plenty of jobs that I interviewed for but never received an offer for. What a comforting lie to tell myself that I didn’t get it because of some quota that needed to be met or it couldn’t have been my personality, experience, or interviewing skills. ‘Qualified’ is not a universal term, there is no specific measure of it, and the skills that each person brings to a position are different. This diversity of human beings makes it impossible to compare ourselves against each other, especially when someone else is doing the hiring.

The truth is that often, many qualified applicants apply for a job and search committees have a variety of different reasons for choosing an applicant. In an incredibly comprehensive study of STEM PhD graduates, Fernandez et al (2020) found that highly qualified recent graduates struggled to find jobs in university post-doc programs, as hiring committees commented that they had too many qualified graduates and there was no specific indicator of quality that led to the candidates being hired. Even in a high demand field, more people are applying for jobs than are being hired, and the reasons they are hired are not even simple metrics of quality for STEM graduates.

I probably was hired for several jobs because I was a woman and there weren’t many women on the team. The hiring managers may have seen this as a strength, but it doesn’t mean that other people were discriminated against because I was offered the job. If a woman is hired into a job that was previously held by a man, this wasn’t a job taken away from all white men. If a black person was hired into a position instead of a white person, it doesn’t mean that the white applicants were unfairly excluded. These people are not comparable based only on this single attribute, and that single attribute does not define their quality as an employee. If a workplace is lacking diversity and a priority is made to hire or retain a wider variety of employees through diversity and inclusion initiatives, we can only see that as discrimination if we have started with the assumption that a white man will always be the most qualified person. Organizations don’t only hire single employees; they hire to make diverse teams.

There is so much more that could be said about DEI. For example, that diversity and inclusion in company management has clear positive effects for companies, that workers have generally positive feelings about DEI initiatives, that DEI programs have often been used to mitigate discrimination lawsuits, or that DEI programs in education will continue beyond any Executive Orders because schools serve diverse populations of students and need diverse teachers and leaders. Let’s not even get to the fact that other countries do have gender quotas for executive board rooms with marked positive effects.

The meme-ification of the term DEI concerns me a lot. I see it being used the way ‘sleep to the top’ was used to degrade any woman in power when I was young. As Don Earl Collins (2025 Jan 23) states, DEI is becoming code for Don’t Ever Integrate, implying that anyone except a white man must be unqualified. The dismantling of DEI programs when the workforce is not representative of the population means that current inequalities will become entrenched. Nepotism is an incredibly strong force that unfairly benefits specific people. Everyone has experienced the boy’s club that promotes unqualified people based on their connections, or helps mediocre workers “fail up”. DEI programs have probably been our best fight against nepotism and, without DEI practices in place, I can only assume this will get worse.

I am grateful for my diverse team. I aim for a more inclusive workplace at all times with equity for the different people I work with. Call me a DEI hire, it’s what makes my team strong.

Citations:

Collins, D. E. (2025, January 23). For us conservatives, DEI is code for “don’t ever integrate.” Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/1/23/for-us-conservatives-dei-is-code-for-dont-ever-integrate

Fernandes JD, Sarabipour S, Smith CT, Niemi NM, Jadavji NM, Kozik AJ, Holehouse AS, Pejaver V, Symmons O, Bisson Filho AW, Haage A. A survey-based analysis of the academic job market. Elife. 2020 Jun 12;9:e54097. doi: 10.7554/eLife.54097. PMID: 32530420; PMCID: PMC7360372.

Rock, D., & Grant, H. (2016, November 4). Why diverse teams are smarter. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2016/11/why-diverse-teams-are-smarter