What happens to research in a post-DEI society?

I started writing this post last November, just after the US election, but before the President Elect had started posting about his planned Executive Orders. I wouldn’t normally consider myself quite this prescient, but I was wondering whether we were in a “post-justice” or “post-equity” society. It was a grandiose phrase that I wasn’t even sure I understood myself. In my infinite Evernote note (title: “thoughts that might make a TSK post”) I jotted down “what happens to research in a society where issues of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity are no longer being tackled with fervor, not because they’ve been solved, but because not enough people care to solve them and indeed several powerful people don’t want to solve them because they’d lose power”. Alarmingly, my thought exercise has become a reality that I’ve been thinking about again in more detail.

What are the triggers for a post-DEI society?

A post-DEI society could come to pass for two reasons. The first is the “powers that be” pulling the ladder up after themselves, and actively resisting progress and change, because they believe “power” is a zero-sum game, and that empowering others means de-powering themselves (only true in a dictatorship, I would say — but in an era of democratic backsliding, this scenario is becoming more common).

For a post-DEI society to come to pass, you need not only the resistance of the few, but also the apathy of the many.

For a post-DEI society to come to pass, you need not only the resistance of the few, but also the apathy of the many. People all over the world are ground down at the moment by poorly performing national economies (and / or wealth concentration). This kind of stagnation quashes aspiration, and people retrench into their tribes, and give up trying to bring about diversity, equity, and fairness for others.

In reality, we are seeing both of these circumstances, most pronouncedly in the US, but in many other countries too (Canada, Italy, Germany, France, all seeing income inequality and a backlash against ‘liberal’ leadership — feel free to add other examples below).

What are the hallmarks of a post-DEI society?

“Jumping at shadows”: inequities are so misunderstood that you pounce on even passing references to DEI

When we fear DEI (as in the case of those in power) or deprioritize it (as in the case of the apathetic masses), we blur important distinctions. By this, I mean that we start treating any mention of DEI as if it were an endorsement of a specific agenda, rather than recognizing that diversity, equity, and inclusivity can be scientifically relevant contextual factors within research on many topics, without being the subject of study. Hence, you see absurdities like deleting research data that mentions DEI terms — even when those terms are merely capturing demographic differences as a basis for studying something else entirely. Deleting all mention of DEI from research data is like deleting age data from studies of diseases; it doesn’t stop age- or DEI-related distinctions from existing, it just makes us ignorant of them, and less able to fix them.

Deleting all mention of DEI from research data is like deleting age data from studies of diseases; it doesn’t stop age- or DEI-related distinctions from existing, it just makes us ignorant of them, and less able to fix them.

“Eyes wide shut”: inequities are so normalized we stop noticing them, let alone trying to tackle them

When we fear / deprioritize DEI, instead of questioning why disparities exist, we go back to accepting them as an unavoidable reality, “the way things are”. I know it’s not everyone’s favourite analogy, but I do think “the fourth box” metaphor is helpful here. It started as a way of explaining the difference between equality and equity.

Equality is about everyone being given the same level of support to overcome barriers. It might seem fair and well-intentioned, but it isn’t really giving everyone the same opportunity. Equity is about recognizing that people have different starting points and different needs, and giving them an appropriate amount of support to overcome the barriers. But does focusing on the semantics of equality and equity blind us to the best outcome — removing the barriers?

“Victim blaming”

When we fear / deprioritize DEI, we justify our actions or apathy by holding others responsible for environmental factors beyond their control. The narrative becomes: “It’s not that society is unfair. It’s that those people just don’t put enough effort into getting the best out of it.” This glosses over the structural barriers many people face. Again, there’s a well-known metaphor / meme about this — Adam Donye’s video “this race called life” (the one where the participants all start on the same line but are then asked to take steps forward or backward based on whether statements apply to them ranging from “are your parents still married” to “did you have to help pay your family’s bills”). The video has been criticized for conflating economic privilege with race, but it is a powerful way of visualizing that people are held back by barriers not of their own making. Shifting blame away from the environments and systems that perpetuate inequity makes it easier for us to avoid tackling the root causes.

What are the risks of a post-DEI society for research?

Ultimately: science becomes less effective if we deprioritize or excise DEI. Here are just a few ways that science suffers:

• Loss of critical data: demographic data, including DEI variables, enables us to understand, for example, who is at risk of developing particular diseases or conditions, and how we can prevent them (and reduce the healthcare burden, improve economic productivity by reducing sick days, etc.); how we can best help children learn (creating a better-skilled workforce); how to design public spaces (enhancing property values); how to improve road safety in different countries and cultures (reducing costs of accidents) — and so on.
• Confirmation of bias: when DEI is deprioritized, there is a greater risk of confirming researchers’ preconceptions and missing aspects of significance. Researchers may interpret findings through an inadvertently narrow lens, without the data to determine whether findings can be applied universally. Homogenous thinking could lead to solutions that don’t fully address global challenges. We risk missing out on breakthroughs that arise from the inclusion of diverse perspectives, leaving the economy at a disadvantage in global competition for talent, ideas, and investments.
• Erosion of credibility and trust: if research is seen as having been censored, it risks losing credibility domestically and internationally. Declining public trust undermines the adoption of policies and innovations that rely on scientific evidence and reduces public support for civic initiatives; polarizing discourse makes it harder to engage in constructive dialogue on important social issues and even increases the risk of civil disobedience. Poorer quality research leads to poorer decision-making (in both public and private institutions), eroding societal progress and economic growth.

You’ll notice I’m distilling all of these down to economic impacts; for authorities that can only think in terms of “the deal”, we end up having to bring everything back to money rather than morals. Ultimately, if we can’t gather comprehensive data and identify patterns within it, then we are putting blinkers on that constrain the potential for research to have a positive impact, not only on the lives of disadvantaged people, but on national and global economies.

Are we actually in a post-DEI society?

Well, maybe not? The situation in the US is of course changing on a daily basis. Various legal challenges are being mounted, and various aspects of the Constitution are being drawn on to invalidate Executive Orders. Part of me still wonders if a lot of them won’t turn out to have been “dead cats”, thrown on the table purely for distraction purposes — it’s just hard to know which ones are the dead cats and which ones are the live alligators.

But perhaps a more important question in the debate over whether we’re in a post-DEI society is the argument that we haven’t yet moved beyond being a pre-DEI society. We’d got as far as recognizing some of the issues around inequity; we certainly hadn’t solved them. So if we hadn’t yet achieved a properly diverse, equitable and inclusive society, we can’t now be considering whether we are “post” (past) it.

What we do seem to be “post” is the ability to have open and constructive discussions about how inequities affect research strategy and what we need to change. And, if I’m brutal, I suspect some people have lost the opportunity to use DEI as a buzzword for maximizing funding — organizations, institutions and individuals latching on to DEI as a box to check to open up greater access to grants, sponsorships, and other resources. (On a side note, this is what I suspect the new administration will roll back to, as a convenient face-saver when the judicial processes prevent them from stopping DEI efforts — oh, well, we weren’t actually trying to stop making life better for disadvantaged people, we were only trying to stop their cause being exploited by bad people doing bad research.

But all is not lost.

What we have not lost is the ground we gained.

We have not lost our greater awareness and understanding of privilege, disadvantage and unconscious bias.

We have not lost our realization that we need to be more inclusive in our thinking.

We have not lost the recognition that inclusivity of different perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences makes research more relevant and significant.

We have not lost the drive to improve the diversity of our research scope, design, methodologies etc.

We have not lost the ability to examine the structures and systems that shape research, ensuring that they don’t perpetuate inequalities or reinforce exclusionary practices.

We have not lost the will to be more intentional in the participants we include in our research.

We have not lost the impetus to be more inclusive in how we communicate findings to broaden audiences for broader impact.

We have not lost the ambition to seek diverse voices and experiences to influence the direction of research.

For now, we have lost the ability to say these words out loud. But that does not mean that our actions for a more diverse, equitable and inclusive research paradigm need to be put on hold while we mobilize to defend research against censorship.

For other suggestions about what to do right now, see “DEIA and Doing the Right Thing“. For more on the background to this issue, see “Upholding Our Legacy of DEIA“.