#ryan ruffaner

By: Ryan Ruffaner

Published: Jul 11, 2025

When Donald Trump recently declared the death of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), sensible-minded Americans across the country—myself included—applauded. At last, the great juggernaut of identity politics, that machinery of race-based preference cloaked in the language of justice, had met its end.

Only, it hasn’t. Not yet.

Trump’s executive order restricting DEI initiatives in the federal government was a landmark decision, a long-overdue pushback against the institutionalization of racial essentialism. It was arguably the most significant victory since the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. But the fight is far from over.

Yes, states like Texas, Florida, Alabama, and Kentucky have passed legislation defunding DEI bureaucracies, and many universities have shuttered their diversity offices. But media declarations of DEI’s demise are premature. In reality, the movement is not retreating—it’s rebranding.

DEI has always been a master of linguistic disguise. Today’s strategy is not to fight in the open but to retreat into ambiguity. Titles are changing. Staff are being reassigned. Programs once openly framed as “equity initiatives” are being folded into offices with softer names: “Student Success,” “Well-Being,” “Access and Opportunity.”

Take the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It eliminated 20 DEI-related positions, but quietly reassigned 27 others. The $5.4 million in savings? Redirected toward “student success” and “professional development.” These benign-sounding categories still harbor the same ideological content—training in “cultural competence” (a euphemism for critical race theory), sessions on “microaggressions,” and the like. This pattern repeats across campuses. At UNC Wilmington, the Office of Institutional Diversity and Inclusion was shut down only to have its cultural centers absorbed into Student Affairs. The Chief Diversity Officer simply found a new title elsewhere at the university.

The University of Oklahoma claimed it had closed its DEI office in April 2024. What it did instead was rename it the Division of Access and Opportunity and reassign the staff. The University of Louisville made a similar move a year earlier, renaming its DEI office the Office of Institutional Equity. Nothing changed except the sign on the door.

In Texas—yes, Texas—I encountered a new undergraduate course titled “Psychological Thinking,” which ostensibly aims to introduce students to the basics of psychology. In reality, it offers the same DEI dogma: lessons on “white privilege,” “microaggressions,” and the social construction of identity.

This is not accidental. The DEI establishment is being advised, often by professional consultants, on how to adapt and survive in hostile political climates. In a 2024 webinar hosted by grant platform Fluxx, nonprofit leaders openly discussed how to keep race-based programming “under the radar.” One speaker, LaToya Ratlieff, the grants director at Hello Alice, explained how simply changing a grant requirement from “only open to Black entrepreneurs” to “preference for Black entrepreneurs” can help avoid legal challenges. “You can’t get a lawsuit for giving ‘preference,’” she said. Ratlieff even suggested using AI to sanitize DEI-related language on websites to ward off lawsuits claiming anti-white discrimination.

Major corporations are playing the same game. Eli Lilly removed “racial justice” language from its 2023 proxy statement and stopped publicly reporting its DEI progress. And yet that same year, executive compensation was still tied to diversity goals. Their website still promotes a robust commitment to DEI. Pfizer was forced to open a race-exclusive fellowship to applicants of all backgrounds after a lawsuit, but its internal structure remains dominated by racially segregated “colleague resource groups.” Microsoft, Apple, Starbucks—all have doubled down.

The acronym itself is now fluid. Companies swap “DEI” for “IDE,” placing “inclusion” first in the hopes of softening public reaction. The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), with nearly 340,000 members worldwide, changed the name of its annual conference from the “DEI Conference” in 2023 to “Inclusion 2023.” The agenda, however, remains the same. Their 2025 conference website still touts a commitment to “inclusion, equity, and diversity.” The acronym may have changed order. The ideology hasn’t.

Some companies conservatives claimed had abandoned DEI are still hiring for DEI positions on LinkedIn. In some cases, those job postings appeared after they publicly claimed to have terminated those roles.

And while “red” states play whack-a-mole with their DEI departments, “blue” states are charging ahead. In 2023, Washington State mandated DEI training in K-12 public school standards. Maryland required its public retirement system to hire a DEI director. Oregon allocated $50,000 for new DEI initiatives.

Even anti-DEI laws passed in conservative states often include loopholes. Provisions carved out for “accreditation or compliance with state and federal law” allow schools and agencies to continue race-based programs as long as they can justify them under bureaucratic compliance.

It therefore comes as no surprise that an April 2025 report by Parents Defending Education found that 245 universities still maintain institution-wide DEI offices. Another 180 colleges or departments within those universities do as well, including Stanford Law and UC Davis’s College of Engineering.

So no, DEI isn’t dead. It’s shedding its skin.

Whenever you hear that a university or corporation has “eliminated” its DEI programs, ask yourself: is the ideology gone? Or has it simply found a new room to inhabit, a new nameplate, a new acronym?

What victory is there if DEI vanishes in title only, while continuing to push the same grievance narratives, the same race-based preferences, and the same worldview of victimhood and perpetual redress?

Real reform won’t come from word games. It requires structural change. Swapping “equity” for “inclusion” does nothing if the underlying assumptions remain unchallenged. Redacting a DEI report doesn’t mean DEI metrics are no longer shaping hiring, promotion, and curriculum.

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DEI is a malignant tumor.

This needs a bounty program where people can earn, say $1000, for a substantiated, successfully investigated and verified case of DEI bureaucrats rebranding themselves to avoid being surgically removed.

By: Ryan Ruffaner

Published: May 21, 2024

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion has taken America by storm. It’s in almost every public school, college, corporation, and organization you can imagine, including pharmaceutical companies, entertainment companies, and even the United States Department of Defense.

To its critics, DEI represents an insidious Neo-Marxist virus infecting the culture of the West, one that could spell the doom of democracy, critical thinking, and Enlightenment values, leading to the death of the West and America with it.

To its advocates, it is a clarion call to fight what they believe is the greatest struggle of our era—racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia, along with all other forms of identity-based injustice. It is sword, shield, and holy book in the fight for so-called social justice.

Those less zealous yet still supportive of DEI believe that surface-level diversity, particularly of race, ethnicity, and gender, can lead to positive workplace outcomes, such as better leadership. For example, HR consulting company Zenefits recommends that companies “prioritize hiring executives, directors, managers, and other senior leaders from diverse backgrounds,” which includes factors like “gender, gender identities, ages, abilities and special needs, races, sexual orientations, religious backgrounds and beliefs, cultures, and nationalities.”

But even this more moderate brand of DEI falsely correlates leadership ability with diversity status and runs the risk violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Rather than treating each person as an individual with unique attributes, this brand of DEI relies on dubious claims that a person brings benefits to an organization merely by virtue of possessing certain identity-based characteristics. Supporters of diversity-based initiatives therefore often embrace the same kind of broad generalizations about race, sex, and other identity characteristics that civil rights laws were meant to counteract.   

Diversity researchers Alice H. Eagly and Jean Lau Chin are typical of scholars who attempt to justify DEI initiatives based on broad assumptions about identity. In arguing that surface-level diversity leads to better leadership, they say that “leaders and followers from diverse identity groups generally face some degree of pressure to behave like leaders from the majority group” while continuing to “express their own cultures to some extent” and this increases their multicultural competence while explaining some of the challenges that hold minorities back.

These claims rely on two fallacious assumptions that certain characteristics flow necessarily from a person’s identity. First, the authors assume that leaders and followers from “diverse identity groups” feel pressure to behave like the leaders from majority groups because these leaders are from a “majority” group, not because these leaders are in a position of authority that these “diverse” people may want to move into one day. It’s common for people to imitate the behaviors of those they want to be like or those whose benefits they wish to attain. This is why professional speakers study famous speakers and speeches, artists study great artists and art, writers study great writers and writing, and businesspeople study the entrepreneurial strategies of startup titans. We imitate that which we wish to become, and this isn’t necessarily predicated on race or gender.

The second assumption is one that we see far too often: that race and culture go together. Race can be correlated with culture in some cases, but it isn’t all the time. A black man born and raised in Houston, Texas is going to have a very different culture and “lived experience” than a black man born and raised in Ghana or London. A Hispanic woman born and raised in New York City is going to have a very different culture and “lived experience” than a Hispanic woman born and raised in Guatemala or Spain. And a white man born and raised in Nebraska or Oregon is going to have a very different cultural and “lived experience” than a white man born and raised in Sweden, South Africa, or Italy. Race doesn’t always correlate with culture.

Eagly and Chin continue with more broad and unsubstantiated assumptions about identity, saying non-white leaders “may be especially concerned about integrity and justice as they relate to the inclusion and fair treatment of individuals from diverse identity groups.” Although this may sound like a reasonable assumption on the surface, it assumes that these non-white leaders are concerned with inclusion and fairness rather than gaining competence, wealth, power, authority, prestige, or other benefits, let alone that they’ve personally experienced based exclusion and injustice that would make them uniquely sensitive to other minorities’ needs. This assumption also is blind to the fact that there are millions of non-minority people concerned with inclusion and justice for people of “diverse identity groups,” as evidenced by all the white people who fought to abolish slavery and secure civil rights for minorities and continue to fight for “racial justice” and “social justice” today. It is also blind to all the “diverse” people who have committed horrible crimes against other “diverse people,” such as Idi Amin (aka the Butcher of Uganda), Pol Pot, and Mao Zedong, as well as every Hutu who participated in the Tutsi genocide, every non-white person who owned a non-white slave, and every non-white soldier who has ever fought in a civil war against people of the same “diverse” group, to name a few.

Eagly and Chin’s claims include many other unsubstantiated generalizations about identity: that “executives from sexual minority groups might be especially adaptable and therefore embrace change;” that minority leaders may gain certain advantages from their “ability to modify and switch between minority and majority perspectives depending on their immediate cultural context”; that people from minority groups sometimes engage in a “strength-based rhetoric” which may involve “explicit claims that their group’s way of leading is better than those of the heterosexual White man who traditionally have exercised leadership;” and that “individuals belonging to diverse identity groups are often good leaders [because] the experiences that such individuals have had because of their differences from the majority group do confer special qualities.”

All of these claims rely on broad generalizations about beneficial leadership characteristics that supposedly flow from identity.  But we have evidence that the surface-level diversity that Eagly, Chin, and others like them are obsessed with does not necessarily contribute to good leadership on its own.

For example, in a rebuttal to Eagly and Chin, University of Maryland researchers Kristen M. Klein and Mo Wang provide four reasons why surface-level diversity does not equate to strong leadership.

First, we shouldn’t assume that just because someone belongs to a certain identity group they’ve automatically been a victim of discrimination. 

Second, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that individuals who have experienced discrimination experience long-term consequences to their well-being, but this is not necessarily true either. 

Third, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that those who have experienced discrimination have integrated these experiences into their life in positive, constructive ways—specifically in ways that improve their leadership abilities—rather than in negative, destructive ways, such as becoming bitter, resentful, or hopeless.  And finally, the diversity leadership fallacy assumes that a person’s surface-level characteristics expose them to more character-building adversity than non-surface-level characteristics, such as growing up in a low socioeconomic background or a single-parent household. But of course this mistakenly assumes that a white person from an impoverished single-parent household surrounded by drugs and crime would have faced less character-building adversity than a black woman who grew up in a safe, wealthy community with two loving, supportive parents. 

You cannot measure the adversity or discrimination a person has experienced purely by their surface-level characteristics. Further, there is no correlation between a person’s surface-level characteristics and the content of their character, or the competency of their knowledge, skills, and abilities. Those who suggest there is a connection are not destroying negative stereotypes, as they may claim. They are merely switching negative stereotypes to a different identity group and continuing the cycle of ignorance and resentment. 

As Klein and Wang point out, “a substantial body of research on deep- and surface-level diversity in the workplace has repeatedly shown that whereas the negative impacts of surface-level diversity decrease over time in workgroups, deep-level similarity (e.g., in values, goal orientations, and personality) consistently predicts positive workplace outcomes (e.g., turnover, job attitudes, team performance).”

While it’s true that some surface-level traits tend to vary with deeper-level qualities—women tend to rank higher on average in the personality trait of agreeableness than men—this doesn’t mean that these traits always vary together, that they have a strong relationship with one another, or that one causes the other. We cannot derive deep-level qualities, such as beliefs, attitudes, values, and skills, from surface-level traits and use these as proxies in employment decisions. Yet this is exactly what many DEI supporters propose.

Hiring and promoting employees, especially for leadership positions, based even in part on surface-level diversity causes enormous harm. Why should employees trust or accept the outcome of a hiring or promotion decision if they know that one of the qualities under scrutiny is an arbitrary characteristic unjustly treated as a competency? Why should people remain committed to an organization if they realize that the trajectory of their future is partially based on surface-level characteristics they can’t change?  Would you truly feel valued as a whole, multi-faceted human being if you knew or suspected that your organization assessed your qualifications based on the color of your skin or your sex? And how could you trust the people around you if you knew that they, too, may have been selected because of their surface-level qualities, not their competence?

However well-intentioned DEI initiatives may be, they rely on fundamentally flawed assumptions and broad, unfounded generalizations about identity, which reinforce old negative stereotypes and create new ones. Competence, not identity, should be the primary criteria for hiring, promotion, and leadership, not arbitrary surface-level qualities like race, ethnicity, or gender. 

Every time an organization encourages people to divide themselves by these surface-level characteristics, the organization entrenches stereotypical thinking and all but guarantees negative organizational outcomes. We shouldn’t encourage people to shackle themselves to stereotypes and call it liberation. Instead, we should hire and promote people based only on their job-relevant experience, knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics that have real value. 

By: Ryan Ruffaner

Published: Aug 10, 2023

Most research on demographic diversity in the workplace revolves around the diversity of age, sex, race and ethnicity. The scientific literature calls these differences “surface-level diversity” because they are immediately observable, biological in nature, and generally immutable. Some people believe these characteristics are reasonable proxies for underlying psychological characteristics and in some cases this may be true. For example, older people tend to feel more satisfied with their lives than their younger counterparts, and women tend to rank higher than men on the personality trait of agreeableness. However, given the huge variation within individual psychology, there are also many instances where you can’t judge a book by its cover.

Furthermore, not all diversity research is equally valuable. For example, some of the literature on surface-level diversity includes organizational tenure and functional background in the same category as age, sex, and race/ethnicity. This is a mistake. It is not possible to determine how long someone has worked in an organization just by looking at them, especially considering how frequently many people move between jobs and companies these days. Nor is it possible to guess a person’s functional background in this way—a uniform can be worn and removed, but this is not possible with age, sex, race, or ethnicity. Functional background is more closely related to deep-level diversity, not surface-level diversity, because it influences characteristics like opinions, beliefs, attitudes, and values more than our age, sex, or race/ethnicity.

Why does this matter? Because including deep-level variables in experiments designed to measure the effects of surface-level variables like diversity in age, sex, race, and ethnicity inevitably skews the results. For example, an academic article’s abstract may say that surface-level diversity is positively correlated with team performance. Activists and media outlets may therefore assume that the variables responsible for this correlation are sex, age, or race and ethnicity, and encourage race- and sex-based hiring/promotions. In fact, it may be that diversity of organizational tenure (mixing seasoned professionals with newer people with fresh perspectives, and vice versa) or functional background was responsible for higher performance. Consequently, we must treat diversity research with caution.

The research that focuses purely on true surface-level diversity isn’t much better. As David A. Harrison, Kenneth H. Price, and Myrtle P. Bell point out in their literature review and experiment on these two types of diversity (more on this later), the effects of commonly studied surface-level diversity characteristics have been inconsistent across studies, and even within studies. In fact, the findings of surface-level diversity studies have been so inconsistent that they differ on whether or not surface-level diversity has any effect on other variables. Some studies even show that surface-level diversity has negative impacts on factors like organizational commitment and job satisfaction, while others show a positive impact. Curiously, these inconsistencies are particularly strong on the effects of race and sex, the two variables that people tend to be most vocal about.

Harrison et al. suggest that some of this inconsistency may arise from the mistaken belief that demographic differences among employees are highly related to differences in attitudes. They are not. There is no correlation between a person’s race, ethnicity, age, and sex and their attitudes. People of diverse races, ethnicities, ages, and sexes can vary in their opinions, their values, their beliefs, their hobbies, and their priorities. And yet, the diversity train keeps chugging along. Why?

Part of this comes from America’s history of discrimination, particularly along the lines of race and sex. The Emancipation Proclamation sought to correct some of this historical injustice, which the Civil Rights movement and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 sought to further rectify. And because America’s past discrimination was mostly justified with reference to citizens’ surface-level differences, these have been the overwhelming focus of the diversity movement. The problem is that modern diversity initiatives seem to be driven, at least implicitly, by two hypotheses with which many DEI advocates are unfamiliar: the similarity-attraction paradigm and the contact hypothesis.

The similarity-attraction paradigm holds that the more similar we perceive other people to be to ourselves, the more attracted to them we’ll be. However, it is wrong to assume that important similarities are only skin-deep. Before designing their experiment, Harrison et al. conducted a literature review on theoretical perspectives from the fields of organizational behavior, sociology, and social psychology. They found support for the idea that while we initially categorize people based on stereotypes, we modify or replace these stereotypes with “deeper-level knowledge” of these people’s psychological qualities once we get to know them better.

The similarity-attraction paradigm also holds that “similarity in attitudes is a major source of attraction between individuals.” Not race, not ethnicity, not sex, and not age. So, while it’s true that we may use a variety of physical, social, and status traits to try to infer similar attitudes, beliefs, or personality traits in other people, our superficial judgements don’t stay superficial for long. As Byrne and Wong remark in their 1962 study, “subjects initially perceived greater attitudinal dissimilarity between themselves and a stranger of another race,” but when these same subjects learned more about these stranger’s attitudes, “perceptions of attitudinal dissimilarity decreased and interpersonal attraction to the stranger increased.”

Other researchers have found the same thing: over time, as people acquire more information, their perceptions become based more on observed behavior and less on the stereotypes they infer from overt characteristics. In other words, simply spending time together, rather than diversity training, is the catalyst for resolving surface-level diversity conflict. This makes sense when you think about it. Whenever diverse Americans went to war against a common enemy and had to rely on each other to survive and succeed, they came to love and respect each other naturally, regardless of their age, race, ethnicity, or sex. No diversity training was needed.

This feeds into the contact hypothesis, which holds that interpersonal contact between groups can reduce prejudice. This may explain some of the well-intentioned pushes for surface-level diversity as well. Diversity activists may believe that diversity initiatives in every organization will encourage interpersonal contact across groups and diminish intergroup prejudice (even though racial relations have never been better). But this demonstrates an incomplete understanding of the contact hypothesis, which only works if four conditions are met: equal status, common goals, cooperation, and institutional support. And under many diversity initiatives, these four conditions are not only unmet, they are actively sabotaged.

How can people engage under conditions of equal status and cooperative contact if they are taught, especially at a young age, that white people and men have an inherent advantage because of their race and sex? How can people engage in equal status and cooperative contact if they are taught that all white people are inherently racist, ignorant, or evil by virtue of their skin color or that all men are inherently sexist, domineering, and oppressive by virtue of their sex? How can people feel they have fair institutional support when diversity initiatives incessantly push for hiring and promoting people based on immutable surface-level traits, even going so far as to segregate workers into so-called “employee resource groups” based on race, ethnicity, sex, and sexuality?

DEI initiatives that teach people you can judge the content of a person’s character by the color of their skin, their ethnicity, their sex, or other immutable characteristics, are an affront to both morality and science. The science shows that it is our deep-level differences or similarities that truly matter, and we cannot derive one from the other. Scientific research on diversity supports the importance of deep-level similarities, especially in attitudes. As Harrison et al. point out, “the few studies that have examined the consequences of similarity in attitudes and values in work groups” found that the more similar supervisors and their subordinates were in their attitudes and values, the higher the supervisors rated their subordinates on performance reviews, regardless of age or education, and the more accurately they rated their peers.

Harrison et al. also cite other studies that found similarity in attitudes to be associated with higher group cohesiveness. Perceptions of attitude similarity, meanwhile, were “uniquely and positively related to subordinates’ satisfaction, performance ratings, and pay ratings,” meaning that no other factors could explain the positive relationship between attitude similarity and these other variables. This shouldn’t be too surprising because attitude similarity is one of the most important predictors of attraction and friendship in general, and there’s no reason to think it would be any different in the workplace.

Harrison et al. point out that when people share the same attitudes, they tend to fight less and communicate more, which reduces stress and leads to lower role conflict and role ambiguity. In their study, they collected two samples from two very different workplaces. One sample included 39 groups of people in a medium-sized hospital for a total of 443 people, and the other included 32 groups of people working in the deli-bakery sections of a regional grocery store chain with an average of 13 people per group. For surface-level diversity variables, they measured the participants’ age, sex, race, and ethnicity. For deep-level diversity variables, they measured each employee’s overall job satisfaction, supervisory satisfaction, work satisfaction, organizational commitment, time spent in their groups, and group cohesiveness (how “psychologically linked or attracted” group members feel toward “interacting with one another in pursuit of a common objective”).

The results of this study reveal a truth that contradicts the current diversity narrative pervading the United States: the longer group members work together, the less impact surface-level diversity has on how well they work, and the more deep-level diversity matters. Contrary to what many diversity activists claim, for both groups of employees, it is not the diversity of race, ethnicity, sex, or age that matters, it is the opportunities for team members to engage in meaningful interactions with each other over time.

The authors’ preliminary analysis undercut the importance of surface-level variables too. They found:

A significant correlation between perceptions of personality differences and how committed the subjects were to their organization and how satisfied they were in their jobs.

A significant correlation between perceptions of differences in value and how satisfied the subjects were with their supervisors.

A significant correlation between perceived differences in interests and supervisor satisfaction and work satisfaction.

Group cohesiveness—how well the group works together—was significantly correlated with the subjects’ perceptions of differences in their personalities, values, and interests. The only criteria that did not significantly correlate with group cohesiveness were surface-level characteristics like age and ethnicity. This was especially true over time. The researchers found that deep-level diversity “has steadily stronger consequences for groups than demographic diversity as group members spend more time together.” They suggest it might not be time itself that matters, but information:

Demographic factors are often a poor surrogate for the deeper-level information people need to make accurate judgments about the similarity of attitudes among group members. Time merely allows more information to be conveyed. Indeed, it might be more appropriate to think of the richness of interactions as the conduit for information exchange (cf. Daft & Lengel, 1986).

The more time people spend together, the more opportunities they have to learn about each other, especially if they work interdependently on a variety of meaningful tasks. These exchanges “allow group members to learn deeper-level information about their psychological similarity to or dissimilarity from their coworkers, where before they would have used surface-level demographic data as information proxies.”

So, why haven’t we heard about all this before? And why hasn’t other research shown similar results? The answer, according to the authors, is simple. Previous research may have discovered different findings because previous researchers did not compare the “relative contributions of surface- and deep-level variables” with “rich interactions among group members.” In other words, diversity researchers were only looking skin-deep, so their conclusions were skin-deep. It may sound like a trite cliché, but what truly matters is on the inside and “the relevant deep-level variables . . . that bear directly on the fundamental purposes of the group”:

In a jazz band or a marketing team, the consensus on the value of creative freedom might be paramount. In a day care center, the critical values to share might deal with nurturance and patience.”

And in academia, we want to ensure that everyone is committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom and encouragement of honest and civil disagreement, and the value of critical thinking. It may not be as easy to measure as simply asking people what they believe, but it is a far better starting place than mistakenly using surface-level variables as proxies for deep-level characteristics as many DEI consultants, activists, and ideologues suggest.

If you’re thinking about hiring a diversity “expert” to help your diverse teams function better, think again. Your employees don’t need help seeing their surface-level differences. They already notice them and they probably don’t care. Whatever conflict there is in your teams most likely has nothing to do with their surface-level traits, and if you call attention to it, you will simply reinforce surface-level divisions rather than creating deep-level harmony.

To make your diverse teams work well together, simply allow them to engage in meaningful, interdependent tasks, and give them plenty of time to get to know each other on a deeper level. It’s that simple.

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