Abstract
A curated collection of essays underscoring what we lose by abandoning efforts toward diversity, equity, and inclusion, this special section considers DEI program successes across business, healthcare, and academia.
In our Winter 2025 issue, we invited five scholars to comment on the U.S. presidential election, shedding sociological light on a current issue from several different angles. In this issue, six more esteemed researchers draw our attention to a lightning rod in the so-called culture wars: DEI.
January 20, 2025. Day 1. The following Presidential Action was posted on the White House website: Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.
Shortly after his second presidential inauguration, Donald Trump signed an Executive Order that rescinded 78 Biden-era executive actions, effectively ending all federal diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility (DEIA) programs.
“By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered: The Biden Administration forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs, going by the name ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion,’ into virtually all aspects of the Federal Government,” the order proclaimed.
“That ends today.”
Trump’s objective was to “terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions (including but not limited to ‘Chief Diversity Officer’ positions); all ‘equity action plans,’ ‘equity’ actions, initiatives, or programs, ‘equity-related’ grants or contracts; and all DEI or DEIA performance requirements for employees, contractors, or grantees.”
Dismantling DEI efforts, some of which date back 60 years, is a key priority for the new administration. And Trump has set about it with astonishing efficiency, leading major media outlets, from The Guardian to The Economist, Bloomberg, and numerous others, to describe his approach as a “war on woke.”
Why do DEI programs matter? How do sociologists understand and explain their importance—and their value for society writ large?
Given the breathtaking pace of this war on woke, we present a collection of timely essays that reflect on the immediate consequences of shutting down DEI efforts across the United States. Scholars who have studied these programs—long before they were even called DEI—have come together in this special section to reflect on the cultural fault lines exposed as they’re ousted from three contexts: healthcare, workplaces, and higher education.
Can DEI save lives? In the first essay, Adia Harvey Wingfield examines diversity in healthcare professions. Critics can disparage DEI all they want, she explains, but research offers incontrovertible evidence that it improves patient outcomes. For instance, women surgeons are dramatically underrepresented in their speciality area, but their patients have lower complication and death rates than do the patients of men surgeons. Similarly, the patients of Black men doctors and women physicians of all races experience fewer complications and longer life expectancies. Wingfield concludes that “abandoning efforts to achieve more diversity among health care providers potentially means patients will suffer.” Indeed, she writes, “Gutting diversity programming won’t advance our nation’s health. Instead, it might literally kill us.”
Shelley J. Correll and Adina D. Sterling extend the conversation into the workplace. Resistance to DEI programs is often based on a misconceived assumption that employers should hire based on merit. But sociologists have found that evaluating qualifications is not a colorblind process. For example, experimental studies have shown repeatedly that hiring managers are more likely to offer interviews to applicants whose names “sound White” versus those whose names “sound Black”—even when their resumes are otherwise identical. The story is similar when it comes to gender: attribute the very same resume to a man rather than a woman, and he’ll get more call-backs. Consequently, Correll and Sterling insist that DEI efforts don’t undermine but enhance meritocracy in the hiring process by side-stepping biases, from the unconscious to the systemic, to ensure that everyone is treated fairly.
In the third essay, Jessica R. Gold, Laura K. Nelson, and Kathrin Zippel turn to DEI programs in universities. They begin by engaging with what’s called the Matthew Effect, or the fact that already high-status researchers are cited more—not because their work is better, necessarily, but because it’s more visible. Of course, when science is driven by status rather than the quality of ideas, the entire enterprise of scientific discovery suffers. Using a National Science Foundation-funded initiative designed at increasing gender equity in academic STEM as their case, Gold, Nelson, and Zippel argue that universities must push back against anti-DEI measures. What’s more, they must make intentional efforts to embed diversity into their infrastructure, where it can become an institutional asset with the power to better advance knowledge, educate students, and contribute to the public good.
Together, these sociological reflections help make clear that DEI is an enemy only to those who would maintain existing social orders—White supremacy, male dominance, and an array of social and structural inequalities.