Earlier this year, I asked an anonymous, right-leaning twenty-something member of Generation-Z to write a column on how they see our politics and country. That column went viral and subsequent pieces have become some of our most read to date. For that reason, I asked Anon Zoomer to keep writing for us on a regular basis. Here’s their latest …

Anonymous Zoomer. “It’s impossible to find a job not infected by DEI wokery.”

The obsession with Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in the corporate world

Matt Goodwin Sep 26

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As a recent university graduate entering the world of work, it’s almost impossible to find a job or career pathway that’s not infected by corporate wokery.

By corporate woke, I mean the professional obsession with ‘Diversity, Equity and Inclusion’ (DEI) initiatives, that essentially demonstrate a workplace’s ‘commitment’ to everybody other than straight white men.

Having started to apply for various private or public sector graduate trainee schemes, every single one involves me filling out a ‘monitoring form’.

Quite how my sexuality is relevant to my application to become a corporate legal secretary is beyond me.

And why should my race be a factor in my application to join the Civil Service Fast Stream?

I had thought that the obsession with the DEI agenda was finally being revealed for what it is – a corporate virtue signalling exercise that does more harm than good.

After all, it is riddled with problems.

The diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda divides people on the basis of their fixed group identities at the expense of their individual rights.

It separates them off into one of the ‘oppressed’ (i.e., racial, sexual, or gender minority) groups, or ‘oppressor’ (i.e. white, straight, men, Jewish) groups, pitting people against one another on the basis of nothing more than their group identity.

It prioritises this identity dogma over meritocracy, forcing entire organisations to focus on “equal outcomes” rather than “equality of opportunity”.

It is instinctively suspicious of any evidence or research that challenges its core claim that Western nations and white majorities are inherently ‘racist’.

It imposes speech codes and restrictions to stifle free speech, free expression, and a genuine diversity of opinions and beliefs in the workplace.

And, on top of all this, it has been shown in a growing number of studies to make people MORE likely to discriminate, or to breed resentment.

Training people about the highly contested and dubious concept of ‘white privilege’, for example, which is directly drawn from Critical Race Theory, has been shown to make elite white liberals LESS sympathetic toward struggling, working-class whites.

However, far from fading from view, my recent experience on the job market suggests this agenda remains completely dominant.

And as support for the kind of luxury beliefs like those spotlighted by DEI increases, standards are slipping through the floor, often at vast expense on the public purse.

The following examples across different workplaces and within the health and education sectors make this point.

It’s become easier than ever to be successful in getting on the Civil Service Fast Stream –mainly due to applications dropping by 45% in the last three years.

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Training is no longer the gold standard and has collapsed. Today, you don’t need more than a 2.2 degree to get onto certain parts of the scheme.

This is rather worrying alongside the recent finding that nearly-half of all first-class degrees in Britain cannot be explained, or that nearly one-quarter of students with three D-grades at A-level are now getting first-class degrees at university.

Nonetheless, it’s in this time that the Civil Service has become infamous for being completely ideologically captured by the most egregious and DEI initiatives there are.

Such as the fact that civil servants are allowed to spend their working time promoting politically activist staff networks, with one such network recently being given £200,000 of taxpayers’ money to spend on the LGBT organisation “a:gender” – who compare gender critical activists to the Ku Klux Klan!

This is insane.

If central government is bad, then local government is no better, spending millions on promoting luxury beliefs for the elite class at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.

Lambeth Council, where I live, just spent more than £25 million on climate and active travel projects since 2019, but is ranked worse than 90 per cent of all councils for failing to deliver basic public services, such as safeguarding vulnerable children and ensuring social housing is fit for purpose.

My bins haven’t been collected on time once since I moved here but, don’t worry, the council has still found the time to campaign on ‘the climate emergency’.

Or consider the education system, such as maths in Scotland. The Pisa report measures education standards among 15-year-old students worldwide, and the latest report reported ‘an unprecedented drop’ in performance, and shows a long term decline in Scotland in maths and science.

Rather than focusing on getting standards up, at a recent conference in Scotland, in 2023, education leaders were told the education system is ‘institutionally racist’.

And if you’re an ambitious teacher who wants to raise the standard of education in Scotland, don’t think of getting a job there unless you’re non-white.

A job advert for non-whites was posted recently in Glasgow advertising to non-white people only. Bear in mind Scotland is 95% white…

Yes, it is common for many DEI projects to actively endorse discrimination – against white men, the apparently acceptable kind of discrimination.

In 2017, the BBC opened an internship that was exclusively for non-whites. While making headlines then, it appears this kind of discrimination is mainstream today.

A recent tribunal, for example, found that an employer did NOT discriminate when they hired a woman over a man because they wanted to hire ‘fewer white men’.

Or take the NHS.

Clearly one sector worth exploring as a university graduate is DEI roles themselves (a starting salary of around £39,000, after all, is not to be sniffed at).

In 2022, the NHS advertised £700,000’s worth of diversity officers in just one month, despite waiting lists for operations being at a record high of seven million.

The same cash could have paid for six GPs, 19 nurses, and 20 paramedics, much like the amount of money we are squandering on our broken asylum system, estimated to be upwards of £7 billion each year, could fund yearly salaries for 200,000 nurses.

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The DEI agenda is now a multi-million, if not multi-BILLION pound industry, fuelled by endless training courses on “anti-racism” and “allyship” which don’t work.

The most important thing a diversity officer must do is justify their own existence by pointing to “systemic racism” and sexism in the workplace.

Back in March, then chancellor Jeremy Hunt urged local councils to spend less on these diversity schemes, given many of them are effectively bankrupt.

An FOI project identified that around £30m was being spent across nearly 400 councils, or about £75,000 each on average.

Given the well-documented financial pressures local councils have been under for years, how can the sheer scale of this spending on the DEI agenda be justified?

These are just a few examples within the public sector of how the diversity, equity, and inclusion agenda has gone COMPLETELY mad.

With private sector firms like Google and Meta downsizing DEI programmes in the last year, and universities in America finally doing likewise, there is a glimmer of hope that things might be starting to change.

But then, look at my own generation, Gen-Z, the members of whom were born in the late 1990s and the early 2000s.

No less than 88% of today’s students say they consider a company’s commitment to DEI before deciding whether to apply to the grad scheme.

I wonder how that statistic will change when half the companies recruiting go bust because of DEI, or its internal contradictions become impossible to ignore.

As an ambitious and hard working young professional, I should be recruited on merit and my ability to do the job, nothing more or less.

This is what people like my parents and grandparents used to believe —that meritocracy not political dogma should guide the labour market.

I only hope that those ideas come back into fashion before it’s too late.

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