Combatting Social Injustice on the Scale of a Public Health Crisis

Abstract

Facing lingering inequality and social injustice, many organizations seek consultants who can offer quick fixes (or “hacks”) that will purportedly solve diversity-related challenges. However, this approach can seriously backfire, given that such light-touch interventions are unlikely to work, and thus may inadvertently provide fuel for broader calls to eliminate DEIJ work entirely. In this piece, I highlight existing work suggesting that: (1) you cannot effectively “hack” DEIJ with small-scale, under-developed interventions, (2) in contrast, robust evidence-based, anti-bias interventions can improve specific outcomes in certain domains, and thus (3) it is time to recalibrate perceptions of the scope of social injustice, which is much more akin to a public health emergency than a small imperfection that can be remedied with a few minor tweaks. Indeed, it is necessary to embrace large-scale preventative, palliative, and curative interventions that robustly and systemically address DEIJ. More broadly, I argue that peddling light-touch diversity hacks may merely offer organizations the opportunity to appear morally credentialed, rather than enact meaningful changes that actually address social inequality.