When you’re moderating a panel at a conference and the room isn’t even half full, most people would ignore it and proceed as if it were standing room only. But Kimberly Lee Minor, CEO of the Women of Color Retail Alliance, isn’t most people.
“Thank you for joining us today,” began Lee Minor, who was leading a panel about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) for the third consecutive year at The Lead Summit in New York recently. “I’m going to just jump in to acknowledge the open seats. So last year we had this conversation, there were maybe five open seats; the year before, people were lined up against the back wall; and as we sit here today, there are more open seats than not.”
Moderator Kimberly Lee Minor noted how sparsely attended the DEI panel was compared to DEI panels at the same conference for the previous two years./Andrew Adam Newman
Lee Minor promised “a great conversation, whether there’s one person in the room or 100” and urged attendees to share their takeaways with friends and colleagues.
Like the attendance for her annual panel, DEI has undergone a marked shift over the last year. Once table stakes for companies, including retailers, DEI has become a culture-war battlefield. Three days after his inauguration, President Trump vowed to “abolish all discriminatory diversity, equity, and inclusion nonsense” in both the public and private sectors. Retailers including Target, Walmart, and McDonald’s have reversed some of their prior DEI commitments.
Panelist Lydia Smith, who until January had served as chief diversity officer and VP of inclusive marketing at Victoria’s Secret, noted that while earlier in the year retailers who were ending their DEI programs (and the ensuing backlash) dominated the headlines, these days many companies are making the news for rejecting anti-DEI proposals from shareholders.
“There was a huge response in January, that was one direction, and now we’re actually seeing more and more companies publicize that their shareholders are rejecting anti-DEI proposals,” Smith said. “So it’s like, where are we going to land?”
Reclaiming merit: Smith lamented that those who’ve espoused DEI to make workplaces more meritocratic are being accused these days of making them less so.
“In this environment of weaponizing the term ‘DEI,’ it’s been linked directly to the opposite of merit-based hiring,” Smith said, adding that longtime DEI executives “would all go out on a limb and say that’s the exact opposite of what we’ve been doing.”
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It’s not the only way that DEI is being misconstrued, she continued.
“Part of what we have to combat right now is this idea that when we talk about this lack of representation…that we’re saying that we should just put people in roles, just because,” Smith said. “We’re saying the opposite…We want to help people get the skills, the development, the coaching, the mentorship that they need. That’s what diversity, equity, and inclusion is truly about.”
“You create an even playing field, and those people who rise to the top excel,” added Lee Minor. “That’s meritocracy, right?”
Hire education: To add diversity to companies, Smith stressed that delegating it to recruiters doesn’t work.
“You’ve got to start thinking about, ‘How do we expose our hiring managers and leaders, not the recruiters?’” Smith said.
“If their LinkedIn profile is all a bunch of people that look like them, and they’re only in orgs with people that look like them, then you’ve already missed the opportunity,” Smith said. “They should be…attending different events and out there meeting people that don’t look like them before a role becomes open and they have to make a hiring decision.”
One decidedly diverse group, albeit a sparse one, was the audience for the panel itself, and Lee Minor said that’s standard for the Women of Color Retail Alliance.
“What I’m most proud about the organization is that there has not been one workshop, one event, or one webinar or meeting that has been homogenous,” Lee Minor said at the end of the panel. “We have women, we have men, we have every race, creed, ability that shows up…because they know that they’ll be welcome and that they will be treated like they belong. They will meet someone that they didn’t know before they walked in, and it will make a difference.”