With a deadline on Wednesday, senior managers should have a solid pearl to find out if they are exposed because of their DEI programs and how they can offer convincing justifications for their initiatives.
In January, President Donald Trump signed an executive decree giving the 120 -day federal agencies to identify up to nine organizations with “the most flagrant and discriminating DEI practitioners”. And since the deadline is this week, companies know better where they are on these questions, if the list was made public, said Kenji Yoshino, legal scholar and professor Earl Warren in constitutional law at the School of Law of New York University, during a panel for FortuneSummit on innovation in the workplace. Much of this is to understand what invents the Dei programs to start, he said.
“We are often asked what is legal and what is illegal because the executive orders all speak of legal, illegal, dei and the answer is that the decrees do not tell us that, because they do not have the power to do it.”
Fortunately, there are guiding principles that leaders can use to determine whether or not their programs violate laws, which Yoshino calls the “three PS”.
For programs to be considered illegal, there must be a preference for a protected group with regard to a possible advantage. For example, the programs that Yoshino considers “red flags”, which means that they are potentially illegal, include resource groups for employees so that women can join or mentoring programs only for people of color.
On the other hand, programs that could be fully legal and what employers are more likely to delay, include resource groups of employees open to all, training on unconscious biases throughout the business, sponsoring a festival of pride or according to hiring data for diversity. Some other policies, such as suppliers’ diversity programs, decrease in the middle, notes Yoshino, as it depends on the rigidity of the directives for this. The ambitious guidelines, for example, are probably good.
And companies should comfort themselves in the fact that other organizations such as law firms and universities have been able to push the efforts of the administration, he said.
“What we saw in these two cases is that the first objectives immediately sold and negotiated. But over time, more and more companies have started to fight.”
This story was initially presented on Fortune.com
