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Chief diversity officer was once corporate America's hottest job. Now DEI is under attack, leaving the people with careers in diversity, equity and inclusion out in the cold. NPR business correspondent Maria Aspan brings us the story of one veteran executive who has been job hunting for almost a year. She reports from Raleigh, North Carolina.
MARIA ASPAN, BYLINE: Candace Byrdsong Williams starts her mornings reading from the Bible on her bedside table. Then she turns to a daily devotional reading.
CANDACE BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: So today's was about keeping the faith, so it was really ideal.
ASPAN: She's a pretty cheerful person. But during this conversation, she started tearing up.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: We're not going to do this early into this interview.
(LAUGHTER)
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: We're not.
ASPAN: She was feeling raw for good reason. Byrdsong Williams has spent almost 20 years working as an executive in what's now known as diversity, equity and inclusion - or DEI. She loves this work, and she's been doing it since 2007. She says she really fell for it after one interaction with a hearing-impaired colleague. The conversation got her thinking about the workplace barriers she'd never run into and what employers could do to remove them for everyone.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: Diversity runs so deep. It's not about the things that you can see, but it's about the things that you also can't see.
ASPAN: Since then, Byrdsong Williams has worked for companies including Nationwide and Cisco. By last summer, she had worked her way up to the title of global director of diversity, equity and inclusion for a tech startup. But then she lost her job in a wider round of layoffs.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: Being a single mom does bring on - you have to have resiliency. And, you know, immediately I was like, you know, it's going to be fine. And it is going to be fine.
ASPAN: Almost a year later, she's still trying to keep the faith, but she hasn't been able to find another job in DEI.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: I've been in interviews. They're like, OK, we're no longer going to rehire - we're no longer going to staff this role. That's when I knew this isn't the same environment that it was years ago.
ASPAN: It really isn't the same environment. Five years ago, the murder of George Floyd and the resulting public outcry sent employers racing to hire thousands of diversity specialists. Within three years, the number of DEI-related jobs in the United States had almost doubled. It was a great job market for experienced executives like Byrdsong Williams, who told me on a Zoom call she was hearing from recruiters every week.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: My inbox was completely on fire, completely on fire.
ASPAN: But at the same time, a big backlash was gathering steam. Conservative critics argue that DEI is itself discriminatory, especially against white men. Here's the right-wing influencer Robby Starbuck on CNBC.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
ROBBY STARBUCK: We do believe in fairness. And I think that the workplace in corporate America has gotten way too partisan, way too divisive. We need to remove this stuff from corporate America.
ASPAN: Even people who support DEI say that employers haven't always gotten it right, but they argue that at its best, it creates more opportunities for everyone. Jeffrey Siminoff oversaw diversity initiatives for Morgan Stanley, Apple and others.
JEFFREY SIMINOFF: The work of inclusion and diversity is actually making the workplace better for most people without taking anything away from anyone or any group.
ASPAN: But as the backlash ramped up, some companies started backing away. Then President Trump was reelected and signed executive orders banning what he calls illegal DEI. Now dozens of private employers have erased even the word diversity from their public documents, and the DEI hiring chill is turning into a freeze. Paulina Tilly is a data scientist for the workplace analytics firm Revelio Labs.
PAULINA TILLY: Companies with DEI teams tend to have more diverse new hires. Getting rid of these DEI functions is really going to pare back the diversity of the workplace.
ASPAN: In the past two years, U.S. employers have eliminated more than 2,600 jobs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. That's according to an analysis Tilly conducted exclusively for NPR. That doesn't mean everyone in those jobs has been laid off. Some employers just aren't filling roles after an employee leaves. And some companies have decided to call their DEI departments something else, like culture or belonging. But Tilly says that employers aren't hiring as much for those jobs anymore either, which is keeping people like Candace Byrdsong Williams on the sidelines.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: When you are directly affected by something, it really vibrates the ground. Like, it shakes and pulls the rope from up under your feet.
ASPAN: Now she's applying for human resources jobs that might not have diversity or DEI in the title. She's hoping that employers will focus on her skills and her two decades of experience. In the meantime, she's relying on her family and her faith. She keeps inspiration from them on display at her home, like a sign one of her daughters painted of a favorite Bible verse.
BYRDSONG WILLIAMS: Psalms 46. He is within her - she will not fail. I'm not worried about failing.
ASPAN: Now she's just waiting for another employer to have the same faith in her and in the work that she's been so passionate about for decades.
Maria Aspan, NPR News, Raleigh. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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