The Long Journey to DEI and Diversity Recruitment

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As a diversity recruiter, do you ever find yourself asking, how and when did this all start? What was the journey that brought us to where we are today?

If so, you are not alone. Those questions were on my mind for a long time before I realized how important it was to answer them. In looking to shape the future of diversity recruitment, I believe that we can make it more effective if we first take the time to understand its past.

And that is exactly what I would like to introduce to you in this newsletter, based on our recent research here at Team JTC. We can break this story down into three key stages that chart the development of DEI as we know it today.

Stage 1 (WWI–1960s): The Early Beginnings of Workplace Diversity

Many people assume that the ideas of diversity recruitment and workplace diversity originated with the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly with the passing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964. While that period was certainly pivotal in bringing equality and diversity issues to the center of our society, it seems that some people were thinking about them much earlier.

Peter Drucker, one of the most influential management thinkers of the 20th century, traced the origins of workplace diversity all the way back to the post-World War I period. In The Concept of the Corporation, originally published in 1946, he advocated for HR practices to advance equal opportunities by promoting diversity in the workplace.

In many ways, this thinking was ahead of its time, but it seemingly failed to resonate with the business world back then. Even today, Drucker’s work on diversity is not well known, and business scholars from Texas A&M University have argued that his contributions to modern diversity principles are significant, but all too often overlooked.

Stage 2 (1964–1983): The Civil Rights Movement and Affirmative Action

The 1960s saw a major turning point when Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibited discrimination by employers and labor unions. It also established the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to handle lawsuits arising from the new legislation. Affirmative action and equal opportunity programs for underrepresented groups soon followed as a direct result of the Act.

While this was undoubtedly a major step toward workplace equality in the US, it took some time for the goals of these policies to actually be realized.

In his 2009 book Inventing Equal Opportunity, Frank Dobbin – a Professor of Sociology at Harvard University – argued that because Congress did not originally set precise rules and regulations for employers, it was HR professionals who effectively determined what equal opportunity meant in practice. Their ideas evolved over time as the movement grew, gaining support as federal enforcement increased during the coming years. In the 1970s, for example, formalized hiring and promotion procedures were introduced in an effort to eliminate bias. By the end of that decade, equal opportunity practitioners could be found in every major HR department.

The 1980s marked another major change, when affirmative action programs were gradually dismantled under the Reagan administration. In response, equal opportunity specialists reimagined these older initiatives as “diversity management” and broadened its scope by incorporating new ideas, essentially giving birth to the DEI movement as we know it today.

Stage 3 (1983–Present Day): Diversity Management Becomes DEI

The term “diversity management” was first coined in 1983 by R. Roosevelt Thomas, Jr., who argued that affirmative action had run its course. A new approach was needed because employees from underrepresented groups were getting hired but were not advancing to senior roles within their organizations. Unfortunately, this sounds all too familiar 40 years later. It reminds us how far we still have to go, even though much progress has already been made over that time.

At first, diversity management remained a little-known concept until it was catapulted into the mainstream in the wake of the Hudson Institute’s Workforce 2000 report, published in 1987, which argued that employers would have to change their hiring practices in the face of coming major demographic changes.

It was hugely influential at the time. All of a sudden, workplace diversity became a critical issue. “Within a few years after the publication of Workforce 2000, diversity had become a buzzword in management circles,” explained a group of academics from UC Berkeley, who added that the report catalyzed a paradigm shift toward the idea of “diversity as a resource” in management thinking.

In other words, it ultimately popularized the business case for diversity, which had previously been a niche concept known only to management scholars. The conversations that followed the report’s publication also began to recognize the importance of inclusion in diversity management. The transition from equal opportunity to DEI was well underway.

The rest, as they say, is history. Since the 1990s, DEI has been an integral part of the business world. And while it is now firmly established as a “must-have” in today’s workplace, we know there is a lot of work still to do to fulfil the vision of equality for all that so memorably entered the public arena 70 years ago.

Those ideas may seem obvious to us now, especially as diversity recruiters, but it shows how far we have come down the path to equality in that time… and also reminds us of how far we still have to go.

JOIN US IN THE COMMENTS: Did anything in this newsletter inspire you, or even come as a surprise? Will knowing more of this story help you in shaping effective DEI programs for your own organization? As always, we value your thoughts, so please let us know what stood out to you from today’s article.