The limits of DEI: anyone can abuse their power, not just white men

Lessons in professional class social dynamics

Introductory note

Grow Some Labia

and I have been writing and talking about DEI, beginning with last week’s examination of how DEI might enable healthier conflict between men and women in the workplace. Here is another installment about how DEI is often not up to its task. We don’t have solutions for this thornier set of problems yet. This piece aims to help us evolve our mental power distribution model in the workplace. We’re not providing solutions here, though we will in a future installment.

i. A Consideration of Power

Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs promise workplace fairness, but their practitioners often fundamentally misunderstand how power works. The irony, of course, is that the theoretical underpinning of DEI is supposedly an analysis of power. But worry not; I read Foucault and most other theorists involved (and it was miserable, just to be precise).

DEI has inadvertently created a moral licensing regime. By categorizing people into fixed groups of oppressors and oppressed, these frameworks paradoxically enable the very behaviors they aim to prevent. Individuals can now use their identity as a moral 'get out of jail free' card, excusing behaviors they would condemn in others.

Just as Kimberlé Crenshaw noted that black women face multifaceted discrimination, my own professional experiences reveal a more nuanced reality. My identities – working class, American, Indian-appearing, woman – intersect in ways that defy our categorical thinking.

I once thought power flowed only from white people (for real). But the experiences I will share taught me that power:

1. Pools in unexpected places

2. Can find the path of least resistance

3. Changes direction rapidly

DEI frameworks oversimplify workplace power dynamics by creating false binaries between oppressor and oppressed groups, leading to moral licensing that can enable discriminatory behavior from any identity group.

Before I proceed, I want to emphasize that my experiences aren’t intended to indict groups based on their identities. Instead, the experiences show that our assumptions about individual behavior based on their group identities are often incorrect. And this is precisely what progressives also argue, but from a different direction. We are at a point of convergence!

To illustrate the complexity of workplace power dynamics, consider these seemingly paradoxical scenarios:

1. A liberal woman discriminates against a conservative woman for having a child.

2. A black woman excuses my shitty behavior to white people based on my experience of ‘microaggressions.’

3. Indian managers with citizenship exploit other Indians on H1Bs.

4. An entire white male engineering team is pushed out of an Indian-dominated company.

But why did all these happen? The answer isn’t straightforwardly race or gender or national origin.

Questions for reflection:

1. When have you witnessed power dynamics that defied simple categorization

2. How might your own workplace experiences challenge established ideas?

ii. I abused my moral license

DEI frameworks can paradoxically enable the very discrimination they aim to prevent. I know because I was complicit in this system as a practitioner and someone who abused its moral licensing.

I've witnessed DEI's evolution from the inside since before it became mainstream in the 2010s. As a diversity recruiter at Google, I embodied what Musa al-Gharbi calls 'symbolic capitalism'—my role gave me social status and moral authority despite my modest salary. Though we primarily recruited white and Indian women into tech, the DEI framework primed me to see systemic injustice everywhere.

The absurdity of these frameworks became clear at my next company, where I led the 'Asian' employee resource group. We attempted to unite people from vastly different contexts under one artificial banner: immigrants from India to Japan, their Western-raised children, and employees across Asia. My main achievement as chair? A Diwali party.

I was good friends with the director of DEI, a black woman. My friendship with her gave me moral license to say things about white people casually and attribute to race what was otherwise ambiguous behavior. I once made an offhand comment about how whiteness drove a group of people to repeatedly empty meeting rooms late. I later found out they had complained to the DEI director about this, but she dismissed it. She excused it by telling them I had been the target of accumulated microaggressions, so my behavior should be hand-waved. This is why social justice culture is insidious - moral licensing enables terrible behavior. I still feel remorse about mine in this period.

This incident exemplifies how DEI frameworks can create a hierarchy of moral authority based on identity rather than addressing actual power dynamics and discriminatory behavior. My status as a woman of color gave me the license to engage in the very behavior that DEI supposedly exists to combat. I am skeptical of the moral licensing raj¹ because I once deceived myself using it. And if something enables terrible behavior among its license holders, would you not question the licensing regime itself? Why are we defending something indefensible?

iii. The liberal and the conservative: a tale of two women

I derided and complained about white people when I shouldn't have attributed their behavior to race. I also enlarged the meaning of incidents to create conflict where I shouldn't have. At the same time, I also experienced abuse at the hands of a white woman: a childless San Francisco liberal. My manager, Shelly, a conservative Austin woman married to a cop, dared to have a second child while working for Cindy. Shelly had the gall to complain about unfair and unclear expectations, prompting Cindy to say, “This is why women with children don’t get ahead.”

By the way, Shelly (who would later be called Karen at a 2020 DEI seminar) hired me, a man of Filipino descent and a black woman, to be her three reports, the most diverse team in the marketing department. After that experience, I started questioning the assumption that liberal women are allies. I began to wonder if I had misunderstood conservatives because Shelly treated me better than any woman had professionally up until that point.

I deservedly was put on a PIP once, but I was taken off because Shelly set clear expectations that I met. She didn’t want to fire me, and I stayed for another year. Soon after, Cindy started and immediately recognized my potential; I felt special. I needed to please people then. Cindy encouraged me to upskill, paving the early path for my current career. She also set me up to fail with an unrealistic workload. Another woman who advanced my career called this the “competency tax.”

When I inevitably failed to keep up, Cindy hired an inexperienced and unqualified white woman as a contractor to take my load. The contractor undermined, gaslit, and damaged my reputation. When I reacted, I became the problem. That ultimately put me in an untenable position; she wanted my job and got it after I left. The cycle repeated when another woman did the same just last year after bringing me to her firm with great fanfare. In both cases, I displayed high competence. Feminine aggression cut me down, anyway. I know better now.

iv. Abuse of power within ‘racial’ groups: a case study

Before I proceed with this example, it's crucial to emphasize that these experiences represent individual interactions, not a commentary on Indian professionals as a whole. I aim to highlight how power dynamics can operate independently of racial or ethnic identity, as we saw above for gender. I know that anecdotes don’t constitute evidence of a pattern but can illustrate holes in a theory.

When I got to the next job as a product manager working for Indian-origin men, I fully realized how myopic my thinking had become. I had never worked in a majority-Indian context before. The company outside of product and engineering was almost entirely white, while the organization I was in was almost wholly Indian. Such contexts in which non-white people hold all the power are outside the logic of DEI, as though white men are the only ones responsible for subpar working conditions and unfair treatment. Secondarily, everyone is predisposed to hiring people like them, not just white men.

The man who recruited me for the job, an American-born Indian, was later fired for sexual harassment (as far as I know, he didn’t actually do anything, but he did try). The thing is, I’m still grateful to this man because he set my life on a different trajectory. My previous career would have limited me, while a technical one is what I choose to make of it. It allows me to succeed more on merit than in previous roles. I asked myself later why I was hired. I imagine the guy who found me had ulterior motives for hiring someone not truly qualified; I didn’t have direct prior experience in product management. But, he recognized my potential and transferable skills. Isn’t that what we want men to do for women at work? These are unpleasant contradictions we should sit with.

Two Indian managers with citizenship, the chief product officer and the director, oversaw a regime of labor exploitation. They expertly extracted maximum effort and deference from Indian engineers on H1Bs, who were the lion’s share in that role. Indians with citizenship exploiting other Indians is par for the course - it happens here and in India. It occurs in every country! Technically, such behavior should count as discrimination based on national origin and immigration status, but no one notices or cares because Indians are doing it to their group.

Another contradictory twist is that these men hired me because they likely assumed an Indian woman would work hard to prove herself despite her lack of prior experience (positive stereotyping). They also secretly gave me my bonus after I worked every single day for a month, despite bonuses being scrapped that year. For this reason, I can’t consider them evil, either.

But regardless of how they treated me (a longer story), they treated H1Bs even worse. DEI misses the immigration status vector of discrimination. That’s because it’s invisible, and race is the most visible. Immigration status is also considered a discriminatory question to ask, furthering the silence around such abuse. No community perhaps has as much experience with H1Bs as Indians, who take the lion’s share, so it can be easy to miss or willfully ignore.

A final paradox: When the company was acquired, I became the product manager for a data engineering team of five white men. I had four engineering teams, three of which were predominantly Indian. The data engineers were strong allies for me and saw the gendered discrimination against me. They dared to tell the CPO that his timeline and demands had always been unrealistic. After that, they worked to the bone for six months, and I was seen as a traitor because I had a strong rapport with them.

There are natural dividing lines within the Indian community: immigrant or citizen, visa status, caste, class, and gender. And Indian men aren’t original in this regard. This is how humans operate, and DEI, as it is understood, carries the assumption that the only humans capable of misbehaving are white, even though this is just how everyone has evolved to be. We discriminate, regardless of our own identities or positions. We have to accept human nature for the solutions to be correctly aimed.

The underlying assumption of DEI identifies whiteness as the source of injustice. As we have seen, injustice can come from anyone with power. DEI does, after all, purport to focus on power structures. I don’t even disagree with leftists about the importance of analyzing power on a macro or relational level. It’s that their analysis and solutions are myopic.

v. Why do I still participate?

Despite the above, I still participate in my company’s organization for women in tech. Women in actual technical positions still face unaddressed pressures. We can’t be authentic lest we offend, usually women (in my experience). We can’t be too emotional lest we scare men away. We have to be perfect because there are so few of us, and our performance reflects on other women. But this is separate from the usual narrative about women in tech, which is that we don’t do those jobs because of upstream discrimination and discouragement from men. I haven’t found this in my experience as I moved from recruiting to technical architecture over 11 years. The number of men who have discouraged me is tiny compared to those who supported me.

Thus, technical women navigate a myriad of landmines. I’m helping build the ERG because I can influence its direction through lessons from several companies and my career transitions. I can encourage the ERG to take on valuable activities, like helping increase technical literacy among people in non-technical jobs or something as simple as leading a book club to spark more profound discussions. I especially encourage my fellow women to make our programming relevant to everyone, not just women. This is because I have understood the importance of making allies of men, and I’m grateful for them.

Anything that increases awareness of differences is less valuable than bringing people together. One of the primary critiques of DEI is that it increases racial and sex-based animus, which is counterproductive. If DEI concepts can be deployed for good and to build allies, they transcend their branding issues. But generally speaking, the only potential good I see in it today is sanctioning such spaces as the one I describe.

Postscript

An earlier version of this essay was focused on how Indians break the logic of DEI. But after giving it to a few brilliant Indian male friends, I realized it wasn’t Indians but the assumption that a person in a protected class can’t also behave unethically toward their subordinates. So, I thank them for their candid feedback and for driving me to revise my argument entirely.

In a future installment, we will discuss practical solutions for achieving a more fair workplace and equal opportunity.

I’m grateful to Sagar,

Ved Shankar

,

Manan

,

Matt Joass

,

Kat Koh

,

Brandon Lee Weaver

,

John Min

, and

Sondra

for your thoughtful feedback. Your encouragement has meant the world.

1. Exactly five people will get this joke. The License Raj was a bureaucratic regime that governed India for forty years following independence. It is credited with keeping economic growth anemic.