Why are some business leaders favouring ‘MEI’ over DEI?

Ask Women and Work

Question: I’m hearing MEI being talked about as a replacement for DEI. What does that mean? And how could it impact opportunities for people of colour and other folks from diverse backgrounds?

We asked Camille Dundas, racial equity consultant and principal educator at The IDEA Practice, to tackle this one:

MEI stands for merit, excellent, intelligence. It’s a term coined by Alexandr Wang, the CEO of a tech company called Scale AI, and the concept claims to focus on merit without regard for things like race, gender, etc. Wang has been quoted saying this approach will “naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives and ideas.”

The concept has gained some traction in the big tech industry and among some other business leaders, but it’s frustrating because DEI does not advocate for people to be hired because they’re racialized or queer or disabled. It advocates for people not to be excluded from a candidate pool because they are racialized, queer, disabled, etc. So, MEI is actually part of DEI; hiring on merit is the goal of DEI in hiring.

MEI sounds like a great idea, right? Just hire the best person for the job. But this approach exposes a complete disconnect from the reality of anyone who’s ever faced any kind of discrimination in the workplace. People hire people they know through their friends, family or past coworkers. People hire people who make them comfortable. You have lots of super-qualified people who are getting screened out of candidate pool because of those very same things that MEI is trying to convince you are irrelevant: race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, etc. Humans make decisions based on biases.

There is a story that is going viral right now about a woman named Aliyah Jones, a Black woman who was finding it difficult to get an interview even though she had an impressive digital design background. So, she made a duplicate of her LinkedIn page, except she changed the name and the photos to an AI-generated image of white woman with blond hair and blue eyes. She applied to 300 jobs and found that her fake profile with the white woman photo got an interview invitation 58 per cent of the time compared with her own real LinkedIn profile, which only got interview callbacks 9 per cent of the time. There are lots of formal studies backing up her experiment, one done right here in Canada from the University of British Columbia. This is the kind of thing DEI seeks to address.

I think MEI is about control. It’s about decision-makers not wanting to give up the benefits of operating without transparency and accountability – two things that DEI demands. DEI requires you to show why you hired this person over that person. Nobody wants to explain why a woman is getting paid less for the same job as a man at their company. No recruiter wants to explain why they suddenly ended an interview when they realized the candidate has a disability.

It’s dangerous how things are being framed as MEI versus DEI. It implies people of diverse backgrounds are inherently lacking in merit and that white, straight males are the default qualification. That impacts anyone who has ever been marginalized, including white people.

The issues that DEI addresses are not going away. Marginalized people are not going to stop advocating for equity. Companies absolutely should be on the lookout for bad DEI practices, like those that advocate for quotas. Goals and targets are a different thing; they are aspirational. Companies need to evaluate their hiring practices and root out bias and discrimination. They also need to implement workplace education programs so that there is awareness across all levels of management about how bias shows up in the workplace. People need to have the tools and language to confront these things instead of ignoring them and pretending they’re not happening.

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