DEI was a novel bureaucratic form created by panicky liberals in 2020. Credit: Getty
The buzzy Apple show Severance depicts a group of office drones trapped in a cubicle hell called Lumon Industries. It’s a workplace drama in which suspiciously little is revealed about the actual work done by protagonist Mark Scout (played by Adam Scott) and his colleagues. It appears to be a Sisyphean task of sorting random numbers — but we have no idea why, and neither do they. Do any of these people hunched over screens do anything of use?
Many of us have wondered the same thing about the tens of thousands of consultants and paper pushers embedded in America’s “diversity, equity, and inclusion” complex. According to data compiled by the research firm Coresignal, nearly 43,000 people were employed in DEI-related roles last year, up from 35,000 in 2022. That means America was on track to have more DEI specialists than commercial airline pilots (56,000) in the coming years.
But we know what pilots do. What exactly do DEI apparatchiks do all day in Anno Domini 2025? We may soon find out.
Last week, President Trump issued his own Severance of sorts. On 22 January, federal DEI employees were placed on paid administrative leave “effective immediately”. As a result, many are being flung back into the private economy at an inopportune time. DEI initiatives had already been hemorrhaging support in the C-Suite and among rank-and-file workers over the past two years; the private sector might soon be just as much of a DEI dead end as the government.
I don’t want to sound flippant about mass layoffs. Losing your job sucks, and extirpating DEI from the government is a mission Team Trump has taken up with McCarthyite zeal. It may cut too deeply. Trump’s decree also revoked the 1965 Lyndon B. Johnson order that created the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC was tasked with preventing unlawful job discrimination “without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin” in the private and public sectors; ending it could have plenty of negative consequences, intended or not.
Here’s the thing, though: the modern DEI state isn’t a righteous flowering of the decades-old civil-rights movement; it’s a four-year-old tumorous outgrowth of panicky progressive paranoia about identity politics. LBJ and MLK would probably snicker if they knew that the main mission of contemporary DEI departments isn’t economic redistribution, but fussily policing the language and manners of college-educated professionals.
DEI is a relatively novel bureaucratic form invented whole cloth by the enlightened liberals of the white-collar world in the summer of 2020 (who says America can’t invent anything new anymore?). After the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, there was a dizzying moment when everyone seemed to be asking, “What can I do to stop racism”? Or more precisely: “How can the Best Buy chain of electronics stores stop racism”?
The lanyard class in board rooms, college campuses, and nongovernmental organisations all over the country responded in the only way they knew how: by creating new bullshit jobs.
The anthropologist David Graeber in 2018 coined the pithy phrase “bullshit jobs” to describe the rebirth of medieval feudalism in the modern corporate world, with the same tendency to create endless hierarchies of lords, vassals, and retainers. Bullshit jobs are the polar opposite of “shit jobs” that are disproportionately blue-collar, paid by the hour, and performed by the serfs. Bullshit jobs tend to be held by the college-educated lords. They’re salaried, sometimes generously, but have little social utility. Graeber said that they are “a form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence”.
The longer your job title is, and the harder it is to explain what you do to a stranger, the greater the chance that your job is superfluous. So it goes with DEI “experts” hired to enrich the workplace with diversity and equity — the latter is a fuzzy term that even Bernie Sanders threw up his hands when asked to define.
Exactly how full of shit are DEI jobs?
Graeber’s taxonomy places bullshit jobs into five categories: Flunkies, Goons, Duct Tapers, Box Tickers, and Taskmasters. DEI jobs could fit all five conceivably.
Consider Flunkies (workers whose purpose is to make their superiors feel important) and Goons (those who deceive others on behalf of their employers). Since the rise of DEI, executives grilled about their anti-racism initiatives by the media can simply gesture vaguely at their middle-management DEI Flunkies and walk away. The Goons are the ones mystifying what they do via the dark arts of public relations. Brands could wallpaper over bad behavior like union-busting by appearing to be Taking a Stand for social justice, even if they weren’t quite sure what that meant or what came next after all that standing.
I say this as a former Goon. In 2022, I did some contract work for a small ad agency hired to do DEI-related anti-racist campaigns. The company was helmed by a black woman, who outsourced much of the creative work to freelancers like myself. There was something bitterly ironic about being a straight white guy whose job was to design woke social-media posts — for Pfizer, among others — about the importance of celebrating Juneteenth. But that job was the kind of grift that helps disguise the fact that the whole DEI world is smoke and mirrors.
The same goes for the people Graeber considered “Box tickers” — those who create the appearance that something useful is being done, when it emphatically isn’t. Will your company unionise or provide your employees with better health care? No, but how about promoting a Queer BIPOC Awareness Day? When I was a reporter covering Atlanta’s public-school system in 2023, I was puzzled by the fact that the district was spending $3.5 million a year on DEI. If your student population is 72% black, what does it mean to diversify it? Were white and Asian children “underrepresented”? No one could tell me. Additionally, three-quarters of Atlantic public-school students couldn’t even read at grade level. But why teach kids how to read when you can “uplift Indigenous voices” instead?
Likewise, “Taskmasters” are the bullshit-job artists who create extra work for those who don’t need it, and that’s what DEI seems to do best. For four years, white-collar office workers have endured the same self-serious seminars on pronouns and “unconscious bias”, and have had to pretend to care about self-congratulatory “awareness” days with social-justice-y slogans. It was all premised on the theory that the way to beat racism is to be hyper-aware of race at all times — the rough equivalent of being told to treat intrusive thoughts about the possibility of death by moving into a cemetery. So, it’s no surprise that a growing body of research shows that DEI undermines diversity, rather than strengthening it.
To make matters worse for out-of-work DEI professionals, corporate America has been cutting back on all bullshit jobs recently amid a surge of consolidation, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the growing realization that many remote workers and middle managers weren’t adding much value. So will there be sufficient demand in other fields for someone in a suit who can lead dour Robin DiAngelo “White Fragility” support groups or write passive-aggressive emails to those using the term “pregnant women” rather than “birthing people” on Slack? That’s anyone’s guess.
Back in the Obama days, those whose hard-hat jobs were outsourced or automated away were told to “learn to code” and join the information economy. But now that the blue-collar sector is hot, maybe it’s time to tell ex-DEI workers: learn to hammer.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeAgree that Wes Streeting’s decision is only a step, albeit an important step, in returning the NHS to sanity when it comes to Trans ideology. Sensible article.
It’s really the most important area of concern. Compared to the risks involved in destroying lives, referring to pregnant women who think they are men, as men, is pretty small beer.
If calling an individual pregnant woman “sir” because she demands it was all that was implied by the undermining of sex based language then you might have a point.
Personally I don’t use “preferred pronouns” for the same reason I don’t speak to their imaginary friends. I refuse to be coerced into affirming something I know is not true. However, I understand that, for example, midwives have to focus on the safe delivery of the child and mother, not fixing the mental health of delusional people.
But that’s not where it ends is it.
Accommodating these fantastical beliefs has led to the attempted “de-sexing” the language of health information, making it confusing or even unintelligible to people not familiar with the current Newspeak. In circumstances where clarity of information is fundamentally important, the NHS is asking people to navigate an ideological language which seeks to obscure and overturn basic biological facts.
And as I mention above, prioritisation of gender over sex in record keeping is playing havoc with the data and statistics which public services, including health, rely on for planning.
What started with “being kind” and respecting people’s identity has very quickly (and predictably) led to clinicians not being able to do their jobs properly and an astonishing rise in the number of female rapists being processed by the courts.
I agree that accurate data is important. So something like F(S) M(G) would make sense.
I get your point, but we all collude in this sort of stuff all the time. Have you never been to a leaving do where everyone applauds as the speaker says that an obnoxious and useless member of staff will be “sorely missed”. It’s a language game.
That’s a false equivalence in multiple ways.
In the circumstances you describe we are expected to abide by the vague social convention of applauding, but nobody is being forced to do so under threat of sanction.
Also, the value of that staff member is a matter of opinion. Even if they are objectively useless at their job, some may value them for other reasons.
It is also of no particular significance, because they are leaving. Please note that I would not go along with the pretence that they are valued in other circumstances where there are consequences, such as a salary or performance review.
As we are increasingly seeing (though should have been obvious all along) coercing society into affirming that men are women (and vice versa) if they say so has a demonstrable negative impact on things like women’s rights, safeguarding of children, and freedom of speech.
Excellent reply.
I thought it was a good reply too, though I wasn’t claiming an exact equivalence. Just making the point that our lives are full of fictions of all sorts. We really don’t live our lives n the pure light of truth.
That’s not even the half of it. Its about forcing everyone else to affirm what they know is a lie, that men can become women if they say so and vice versa. The bigger and more ridiculous the lie that you can coerce people into accepting, the more control you have.
As so often, Orwell saw this coming:
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
If the policy simply stopped at “respecting a patients gender identity” at a clinician-to-patient level, then it might be defendable. There are circumstances in which a doctor will legitimately judge that it is preferable to refer to a patient by preferred pronouns, for example in order to expedite treatment for a distressed patient.
But of course it doesn’t stop there. As with so many other areas, once you allow men to self-identify as women, then it becomes functionally impossible to maintain a separate women’s category. Sooner or later – normally sooner – a man will self-identify into that service, sport, refuge or whatever and it is no longer a separate women’s service.
I was at a Future of Government IT conference recently where a delegate (who turned out to be Maya Forstater) raised a point from the floor that NHS radiographers are having to double-check whether every patient might be pregnant because gender is being recorded, not sex. They simply can’t trust that the patient record contains the correct information they need for their clinical purpose any more. Not only is this a waste of valuable NHS time, it risks having a catastrophic impact on health service planning if some of the most important data can’t be relied upon.
Increasingly it is women identifying as men – hence the pregnant man stuff.
Would it really cause so much outrage if NHS staff simply asked about biological sex? They could simply ask everyone. Certainly quicker than pretending biological men can be pregnant.
It only causes outrage to the type of dimwit idealogues who think that recognising biological reality is “violence”.
Unfortunately that group has disproportionate influence.
But do we know that is the case, or are we just assuming it is?
You may well be right, and that’s my experience of activists in general. But do we know that the average trans person behaves like that?
It only takes one to complain and then all hell breaks loose.
Perhaps – but that’s our fault for taking fools seriously.
I don’t think the average trans person behaves like that at all. Certainly the limited number I have met in my life haven’t.
Just as I don’t think the average black person is bothered on a day by day basis by white privilege.
I do think that a proportion of highly vocal trans people and activist fellow travellers have had a disproportionate influence in this area.
On that we agree. Though this isn’t new with trans. Activists have been up to this nonsense for as long as I can remember.
Interesting that you mention Orwell.
Current ‘wokeness’ will propel us into very dangerous conditions in the near future and beyond. Control is coming in the form of the ‘social credit system’ that is being adopted from China. Canada will unfortunately be one of the first countries to implement these draconian measures that closely parallel Orwell’s 1984…
I look forward to the law suits for “child mutilation” hitting full flow.
And watch all those doctors involved go into hiding, change their names, and scurry off overseas. Like all such people, when the tables turn, they’re the first to say it wasn’t them and that, secretly, they were against it all along. It would be a moot point to call them gutless creeps, of course!
Congratulations to Wes Streeting on doing this. I do wonder however about the design of suggested future studies. Which group of children would be selected for possible mutilation in these experiments ?
It’s an outrage that the NHS uses resources to push political ideas.
I doubt that the NHS would save much money from ditching EDI but it would, perhaps, focus minds back to their reason for being.
But when did it start doing that?
Perhaps you should read the article again
Many years ago men married women and they had babies together. Perhaps things were better then and perhaps they weren’t, but things have changed and become more complex since then. A child can now have two dads or two mums.
But I’m not sure we can really turn the clock back now to those simpler times. So why call a sudden halt only with trans? Is pretending that a child can be born of a man so different to pretending that a child can have two mothers?
Yes, it is. A child who has two mothers is not having their body pumped full of chemicals that will irreversibly alter their bodies, lead to healthy body parts being cut off for ideological reasons, and ensure that they’ll never have a satisfactory and/or fulfilling sex life. So, I would say that there is a BIG difference.
There are multiple issues here with varying degrees of seriousness. My comment is about the language issue. If we refer to two women as the mum in relation to a child, is that so different to referring to the mum as a man. Both deny biological fact.
The issue you refer to is a far more important one, and I think Wes S is right. I also think we need to know far more about what trans is as a phenomena.
It’s like I said on the Pink News story: ‘his husband’ directly led to ‘her p*nis’.
I noticed your comment, and agree.
. There’s a real misconception that this all started with trans. There are even people who treat woke and trans as synonyms. Either they were quite literally born yesterday or they have no cultural memory.
Took a Labour Minister to do the obvious. Good.
There is a degree of EDI twaddle in NHS, but it doesn’t impact vast majority anywhere near the amount commentators may suggest. We’re too busy. And furthermore managing Trans patients is not new. There have been trans patients for years and usually sensitive commons sense approach adopted.
As well as trans patients not being new it’s probably true that NHS attracted and employed a higher proportion of LGBs for decades too. Diversity per se doesn’t frighten most NHS workers in quite the way it seems to frighten others, esp the keyboard warrior types, because it’s the norm.
Thanks for a sensible post.
There have been trans patients for years and usually sensitive commons sense approach adopted.
So why did society deviate from those approaches to ones that defy common sense? It’s not ‘diversity’ to pretend that a man is a woman or that a guy can get pregnant.
The issue with Minors does seem to have been driven by a particular group of clinicians whom Cass Report rightly excoriates. The rest aren’t really new issues, although perhaps social media and greater awareness has led to some potential abusers using a Trans identity and Sturgeon got it all wrong in Scotland. However it’s wrong to lump all Trans into this. They are not new and in the NHS we’ve handled their care needs quite sensitively in the past without all the bandwagon jumpers. Most just want to quietly get on with their lives grappling with what they’ve been given. You see all types in hospital when folks are vulnerable. There is little in the human condition one doesn’t come across.
“They are not new”. They are exactly that. Before 1990 there wasn’t a single transgender person in the world.
The concept ‘transgender’ hadn’t been invented.
I don’t know about the concept, but there have been trans individuals throughout history and across cultures. You can’t base your arguments on ignorance.
For an entertaining example, read the account of Gaugins arrival in Tahiti.
And I guess you would contend there were no Gay people until 1967?
Keep posting. You’re making sense, in spite of the down votes.
This will be the Wes Streeting who worked at Stonewall as Head of ‘Education’?
Perhaps journalists should ask him why children are taught LBGT+ in primary school?
‘Normalising’ LBGT+ is part of the answer.
Why is this not ever mentioned or discussed in Unherd (stupid title)?
If you teach children what it is to be trans, some will decide they are.
Once again, you’re being ridiculously negative about Unherd for no good reason.
Unherd doesn’t exist to meet your individual requirements in the commissioning and publishing of articles. If you’re unhappy with the content, you have two obvious options:
1) Unherd asks for potential writers to submit their work and credentials for publication. Why not do so yourself, perhaps on the very topic you accuse it of not dealing with?
2) Unsubscribe.
In the end, making these whingeing requests of Unherd detracts from whatever other points you’re making, so you’re shooting yourself in the foot.
1. I have done this, obviously with no success.
2. Perhaps I will one day.
But, in the meantime,
I am perfectly entitled to call out Unherd (stupid name. Replace it with Herdthinking please) on the fact they feature no writer to explain what Gender Ideology is, and by doing that, they protect that Ideology.
How many articles are you unable to read that’ve centred around gender ideology? If not since you subscribed, try looking in the archives, under Kathleen Stock, for instance.
You’re welcome…
I am waiting to see an article that will criticise Gender Ideology. I don’t count the hundreds of articles that say it is absurd or gobbledegook or nonsense etc etc. Those have about as much value as someone crying and waving their arms about.
Stock argued that gender identity is a fiction. The trouble is someone will turn round and say “for me, it isn’t”.
Stock did not explain what gender is, where it came from and why. She did not explain why academic feminists created the concept of gender and support it to this day. She did not explain why they replaced sex with gender, and why gender is now taught in schools, and how it is being taught. She did not explain how Gender intersects with Race. This is vital if you want to refute the concept. You have to set out clearly what the Ideology is before you can rebut it.
No one makes the effort in Unherd.
Although KS does touch on this in her book. Perhaps she should cover on Unherd.
BTW – wrote comment above before reading your comment. It is irritating to see some of the originators of this taking a “nothing to do with me guv” approach.
My concern on this one is that it’s too one sided. And KS excepted, too much ranting and polemic.
I think what RL might feel is missing is an honest acceptance that gender ideology is rooted in feminism. Clearly it is, but the second wave feminists who appear on here would rather sidestep that uncomfortable fact.
The midwives always had the right idea about gender. Look between their legs
It is not only staff who are impacted by “trans inclusion” policies. ——-> How typically Orwellian. The demand for including one group and its wishes necessarily means excluding another group and its beliefs. It’s how we end up with stupidity like ‘pregnant people’ and ‘chestfeeding.’ Ideological capture is never pretty but the people in its grasp are quite stubborn about staying there.
The description of ” …a tiny minority of expectant mothers who identify as transmen or non-binary, women who are apparently triggered by words like “female” but not by pushing a baby out of their vagina” well captures the absurdity of gender ideology. As a lesbian weary of seeing the gay rights movement forcibly teamed with homophobic, misogynistic trans activism, I hope the insanity perpetrated under the nonsensical guise of “LGBTQ+” is coming to an end.
Adding this 12/13, because it gave me a much-needed laugh. Nellie Bowles of The Free Press in her rollicking Friday round-up. (Bowles and wife Bari Weiss are former NY Times writers who founded TFP. Weiss recently did an excellent interview with Keme Badenoch):
Forced puberty for all: The English must now all go through puberty, per vicious and fascist new NHS policies that ban the use of puberty blockers. Yes, even if your daughter plays with trucks, you cannot sterilize her with puberty blockers. If your son wears a dress, he must still be allowed to grow to a typical adult height and bone density. Horrible. What next? Gays having children?!
Important piece.