Blessed Are the Equity-Deserving

Were you one of the many in the UK who had the experience a few years back of feeling bamboozled when you returned to the office after the Covid lockdowns and found that a minor function of the HR department to promote diversity and inclusion had been upgraded to a major responsibility as custodian of a nascent Holy Trinity of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)? This was, of course, in addition to DEI having become embedded within the Social and Governance functions of a second Holy Trinity, ESG, which seemed to have mysteriously become an overriding priority for major corporations to pursue.

But all that is of course by now just water under the bridge as we all worship at the shrine of this new pantheon (or make pretence to). Or it would be, if it could be elucidated what these terms equity, diversity and inclusion actually mean, as opposed to the proscriptive and prescriptive policies which they have been used to justify, or the nebulous ideals it is claimed they are accomplishing. As with the original trinity of the Holy Catholic Church, it is more important for the laity to profess faith than to possess understanding.

In a previous Societal Values article exploring the meaning of equity, Don Trubshaw argued that it is a particularly tricky concept to tie down. Ostensibly:

Equity is defined as the quality of being fair and impartial (OED). As such it is uncontroversial and clearly a good thing, something we should all aspire to. 

However, when we dig down we find that in a DEI context equity

is not what we fondly imagine it to be. In fact, it cleverly taps into our predilection for fairness by a type of misdirection such as practiced by professional magicians, thus covering up its true nature.

My own assessment, based on observing the subsequent weaponisation of the concept at the hands of social justice activists, is that it has become a euphemism for a form of invasive enforcement of equalisation of outcomes, selectively applied to groups favoured by such activists as victims of purported historical injustices, at the expense of potentially everyone else, but in particular those whose views or interests are seen as obstacles to the advancement of their social justice agenda. So, for example, as a woman you may be favoured, but not if you are one of those objectionable types who cavil about the appropriateness of transgender rapists being held in women’s prisons.

Now it may seem to you, based on your own experience, that I am adopting here a somewhat cynical perspective and that advocates of equity are not as blatantly partisan as I am suggesting; to which I would reply that this depends on which advocates you listen to and whether you are following the latest developments. You might want to pay attention to what has been happening in Canada under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, where things have gone rather further down the path of DEI enforcement than the UK and the enforcers’ gloves appear very much to have been taken off. In a recent op ed in the Daily Telegraph, Prof Eric Kaufmann, author of Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution, argues that Canada is disintegrating under the onslaught of the relentless pursuit of Trudeau’s social justice agenda:

Along with his fellow travellers in the institutions, he set to work ripping the country’s historic identity to shreds. The three prongs of the attack involved setting fire to its past, promoting LGBTQ and critical race theory in schools and government, and unleashing an unprecedented wave of mass migration. Only now that the full impact of this cultural revolution is sinking in is the country waking up. Even the mainstream liberal left admits things have gone too far.

The concept of “equity” is embedded in Canadian law through the Employment Equity Act (1995) whose stated purpose is

to achieve equality in the workplace so that no person shall be denied employment opportunities or benefits for reasons unrelated to ability and, in the fulfilment of that goal, to correct the conditions of disadvantage in employment experienced by women, Aboriginal peoples, persons with disabilities and members of visible minorities [the four designated groups].

Employment Equity Act

But three decades on what has transpired is that, rather than equity functioning as a tool for the establishment of fairness and impartiality in society, it is being advanced as a basis for dividing society, distinguishing social groups who should be afforded the opportunities and benefits of equity from the rest, who by implication are not deserving of such opportunities and benefits. As a typical example, Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario in setting out its Employment Equity Policy provides the following definitions:

Employment equity is a program that contributes to the overall effectiveness of an organization because it is a human resource planning tool designed to eliminate barriers in the workplace that may prevent the full participation of all employees and potential employees, including designated and equity-deserving group members.

Equity-deserving Groups is a term which includes the four designated groups plus persons who identify as 2SLGBTQ+ in the context of the Queen’s University workplace.

Notice that, since the designated groups who are deemed to have experienced “conditions of disadvantage in employment” are characterised as equity-deserving, it becomes clear ‘equity’ here is no longer operating as a universal principle to be upheld without fear or favour but, in practice, as an entitlement made available only to certain designated groups. This, despite the purpose of the policy being described as “to provide for equal rights and opportunities without discrimination with the aim of enabling the full participation of every individual in the development of our community” (emphasis added).

Likewise for the Employment Equity program of Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, which defines “equity-deserving groups” in similar terms and commits to “increas[ing] the representation of equity-deserving groups within its workforce.” Indeed the adoption of this concept appears to be almost universal in Canadian university admissions policies.

So, what are the consequences for those groups which are deemed to deserve equity? One of the most important is that there will be quotas set aside for you in university and employment admissions policies. Journalist Margaret Wente, in an article published on the Quillette web site in 2022, documents how At Canadian Universities, Race and Gender Quotas Have Become a Way of Life. Also, since such quotas have “increasingly become mandated by governments, human rights commissions, and major funding bodies,” even universities whose administrators disagree with the policy are obliged to implement it. Wente documents how the discriminatory policies were originally justified as temporary but grew ever more invasive and entrenched as they evolved (and failed to accomplish the originally prescribed goals they were supposed to realise):

These preferential-hiring policies were originally justified as stopgaps that would supposedly be phased out over the years, as disadvantaged groups caught up. Yet they’ve become part of Canada’s permanent policy landscape, with the federal government already having set expanded equity targets for 2029. Instead of being calibrated to reflect the pool of eligible applicants, the quotas simply match the general population. And so, by 2029, 50.9 percent of Canada Research Chairs must be “women and gender minorities,” 22 percent must be racialized minorities, 7.5 percent must be people with disabilities, and 4.9 percent must be Indigenous. As a result, some university recruitment efforts—including in fields that have little do with identity, such as quantum computing and computational biology—now flat-out exclude white males who don’t self-identify as disabled or LGBT+. And Canada’s leading university, the University of Toronto, recently announced that all recruiting for Canada Research Chairs will be restricted to the aforementioned “designated” groups in regard to engineering, dentistry, medicine, and various other disciplines.

How one might go about explaining to an applicant whose CV is binned without any consideration because he is the wrong skin colour and gender that this is a consequence of a process “enabling the full participation of every individual in the development of our community” is difficult to imagine.

Of course we are told the same story in the UK about discriminatory practices in pursuit of DEI goals (disingenuously dubbed “positive action”) being a temporary measure. But when we see the huge teams of highly paid DEI consultants and policy implementers which have been put in place and the layers of regulation and policy prescription, it is fairly clear that we in the UK are on a path not too dissimilar to the one Canada is following.

But the inherent one-sidedness of the approach would appear to have been baked in by the separation of those deserving of equity from the rest in terms of right of redress against perceived injustices or inequity. Ironically it is the argument of those who push for DEI policies that the most pernicious inequity that they are countering is that of systemic biases flowing from embedded power structures. But what if the power structures denying those not in designated equity-deserving groups are set up by those who get to make the rules about how equity is defined and administered? Who will mind the minders?