The DEI Backlash Is Doing Real Damage. Some Of It Is Also a Receipt.

I built part of my career on something my own data now calls into question.

Here's what happened. We ran a study. 780 working adults in the UK. We wanted to know why people freeze when they see something unfair at work. For example, a colleague talked over, a concern brushed off, a joke that lands wrong and the room goes quiet.

I expected the usual answer. People freeze because they're scared. Or they don't care enough. Or they don't notice.

The data said something else.

The people who froze cared exactly as much as the people who acted. Same values. Same good intentions. What separated them was small and unglamorous. The actors had a script. A specific thing to say in the moment. The freezers didn't.

People with a script acted 85% of the time. People without one acted 27% of the time.

Then came the part that got under my skin.

We asked everyone what would most help them speak up. The top three were seeing a leader do it first, knowing the company would protect them, and trusting a colleague to back them up.

Training came fourth.

Fourth. Out of five.

The thing my industry sells the most. The thing I have stood at the front of rooms and delivered. Awareness. People ranked it near the bottom of what would actually help them.

I have been part of the problem in more ways than one

Let's be clear about what that means for someone like me.

Yes I've made my fair share of mistakes and fuck ups.

But for two decades, I and the inclusion industry has sold awareness. Workshops. E-learning modules. The annual unconscious bias session you click through before lunch. The promise was transformation. The product was a slide deck.

I have been in those rooms. Some of them I was facilitating.

And here is the uncomfortable middle of all this. The anti-woke backlash is loud, and a lot of it is in bad faith. People using a real frustration as cover for something uglier. I'm not going to pretend that part away.

But underneath the noise, some of the frustration is a receipt.

It's the bill arriving for inclusion work that was performance. Compliance dressed as culture. A workforce got managed instead of led, and they could smell it. You cannot run people through a mandatory module on respect and expect them to feel respected. They feel processed.

When the work is theatre, people notice. And some of the backlash is just people who noticed, saying so badly.

The methods failed, not the goal

The goal was never the problem. Most everyone can agree that we want fewer people frozen out of conversations, more people backed up when they speak, and teams where the quiet ones get heard. None of that is under attack by the data. The data loves that goal.

The method is the problem.

We measured the wrong thing for years. Most organisations check their allyship by asking people if they support fairness. Almost everyone says yes. That number tells you nothing. The gap was never in what people value. It's in what they do when it counts.

We trained awareness when people needed a sentence. We ran sessions on why exclusion is wrong, to people who already figured yeah of course it's wrong. We aimed at the head when the gap was in the hands.

That's not an ideology failure. That's a design failure. And design failures can be fixed.

What leaders cannot just ignore

If you lead people and you've gone quiet on this because the climate scares you, I understand the instinct. Saying nothing feels safe.

But the reality is, saying nothing isn't safe.

The data says your people aren't waiting for a position paper or another mission statement. They're waiting to see you do the small thing in the small moment. The colleague gets talked over, and you say "hang on, she wasn't finished." That's it. That's the green light. Permission, modelled by someone with authority, beats any learning and development module you can buy.

When you go silent, you don't avoid the argument. You hand it to the people making it in bad faith. They're happy to fill the space.

So the thing you cannot ignore isn't the DEI backlash itself. It's the real grievance buried inside it. Some of your people have sat through inclusion work that insulted their intelligence. If the only thing you offer next is more of the same, louder, the backlash was right about you.

Do it better, and it wasn't.

These are early findings. First wave of a three-year study, and we're opening the full dataset so anyone can check our work.

P.S. The student who taught me the most about this never sat in one of my workshops. She marched down from the back of an auditorium with a notebook full of everything I'd done wrong. I wanted to put her in her place. Instead I shut up and listened. Turns out that's the whole skill. Not a module. A sentence, and the nerve to mean it.