Or it's not a hiring problem, it's a pipeline problem.

The D and I goals are great. It's the E that has conceptual problems. And, in practice, people tend to couple noble-sounding rhetoric with simplistic metrics that warp all the goals.

First, let's talk about the conceptual problem with equity. For good or ill, we live in a fairly heavily capitalistic society, with high mobility for employees. This means that if you, in your company, invest a bunch of extra resources to "level the playing field" for people who previously were on an uneven playing field, your competitors can use all the money they saved by not doing that to give your employee a much better salary than you can. So you go out of business, the employee does great, the other business does great; but the next employee who needs a leveled playing field doesn't have an employer who will do that.

Now, if the playing field is already almost level, then intangibles like company culture can make up the slack. But relying on equity-promotion to make a substantive difference is asking companies to lose at the capitalism game. That's not how to do it.

Companies should handle the things for which self-interest produces reasonable outcomes. Government and society should be the ones who level the playing field. And they should, bigtime!

But DEI as conceived by many, including you, shifts the burden to companies. The only real solution--given bad PR on one side and handing free money to competitors on the other--is for companies to tick "we love DEI" boxes as cheaply as possible without actually investing extra in people in the name of equity. It's no surprise that we see a lot of that: we set up a system for which that is the winning play. You can sometimes get people to take bad strategies for a while, but if you want sustainable good outcomes, you want to play a game where the good outcome and the winning outcome are closely aligned.

As I said, there's a small amount that can still be done at the corporate level, but compared to the D and I aspects, it's tiny. DeI at best.

Now, it's entirely true that some companies are bad at sourcing talent. However, there are entire industries where being bad at sourcing talent is not the reason why the simplistic metrics you suggest stubbornly come out as "bad" and "no progress" from year to year.

In the United States, roughly 4% of people who get Computer Science or Engineering Ph.D.s are black. Google has 4% black CS/E people in tech. A decade ago, it was 2%--and that was a sourcing-or-hiring-talent problem. But at this point, there isn't much headroom for Google: the kind of talent they need isn't being delivered to them in a racially diverse workforce.

If it was a matter of diversity, equal opportunity, and inclusion, which is at worst neutral and at best a win for companies, then we'd all go, Yay! Google pretty much solved its race problem! So has most of the tech industry! Next problem!

DEI advocates, instead, often use metrics like those you suggested to decry the sorry state of affairs--indeed, the affairs are sorry--but put the burden on companies to fix it instead of society to provide the opportunities. Fixing the pipeline is hard. It starts really early (e.g. if your prenatal nutrition is messed up, your playing field isn't even). It's really really important, though, because that is how you enable people to have rich, rewarding lives.

There are all sorts of caustic follow-on effects that permeate how DEI is done in practice because of the unwillingness to account for pipeline issues (including subcultural differences between groups). "It's not 14%, it must be the microaggressions!" "It's not 14%, you must be bad at hiring!" And so on. The amount of willingness to understand whether the company has a bad process, or has a perfectly fine process that is in a society that is unequal, is very low.

That's where "equity" comes in to rescue people who don't want to come to grips with the difficulty of the situation. If you say "equity" enough, you can try to move the burden from the DEI advocate needing to understand the complexities of society to the company needing to sacrifice itself in order to compensate for the ills of society.

But the company, even if it is self-sacrificial, can't solve the most of the problem, because something clearly went wrong earlier. Yes, there can be beneficial follow-on effects that can help make society more equitable, but you'd get there a lot faster, more fairly, and more cheaply, if you actually tackled the problem head-on (like Harlem Children's Zone does).

Furthermore, DEI metrics have a tendency to be self-affirming for the need for more DEI rather than focused on good-for-people + good-for-company as the bottom line.

Let's look at your suggestions.

(1) Track workforce demographics. Sure! You can't detect whether there are problems with how a company treats some subgroup if you don't keep track of the subgroups. But you don't include, critically, anything that lets you tell what the demographics should be. If you can't come up with sensible metrics for what reasonable goals are--and that's the hard part, not asking your employees to check a few boxes--then those numbers are all pretty much pointless on their own. For instance, if you run a school system and want to provide speech pathology services, you need to have realistic expectations about the racial and gender diversity available. You absolutely need an estimate of the credible candidate pool. So, yes this is great, but you stressed the easy part, not the hard part, and you need both.

(2) Pay equity audits. You claim that DEI is not about hiring underqualified candidates. But if you hire underqualified candidates anyway (because you didn't do the hard part in step 1 of figuring out the credible candidate pool to normalize against, and kept pushing on "demographics aren't right!" until people started hiring underqualified candiates), guess what happens? It shows up in your pay equity audits, unless your statistical analysis is a lot better than anyone usually does, because you need a model that has a pretty strong demographic-blind expectation. So I totally support the idea, but you again stress the easy part, not the hard part, and again, you need both.

(3) Employee surveys--these are a good idea, but one has to keep in mind that depending on how they're presented, the answers are rather pliable. If you prime people with a DEI training that stresses certain types of issues over others, you'll probably find high rates of response to what is stressed compared to that which isn't stressed. I wouldn't even bring this up, except you push DEI training in metric 5.

(4) Focus groups are good for groupthink, which are good if you need to get something done or some problem solved, but not to gather opinions. This is simply not how to "uncover issues". You definitely do want qualitative feedback, but not from a "focus group" because you get people clustering around thought leaders. (If, instead, you focus on something where you can have a quantitative estimate, then a group discussion may help.)

(5) DEI training metrics are okay if the knowledge is important, but what you really want are DEI effectiveness metrics. Does the DEI training help solve real issues in some reasonably objectively measurable way? Or are you introducing stereotype threat into previously safe situations, tricking people (including maybe yourself) into believing there's bias when it's actually a different psychological effect, and priming people to report problems that weren't actually high on their list of concerns? You can do either. If you don't have a good way to measure outcomes, then it's hard to know whether you're empowering people to address pre-existing problems, or making people fearful and suspicious.

(6) Diversity spending goals have all the same problems as hiring goals.

(7) Internal advancement metrics are one of the best things one can collect, because since it's internal, you actually have access to most of the information you need to set a reasonable expectation! This should be stressed _more_. You know what the credible pool is, have the best read on candidate quality that you could (especially if you institute some sort of blinded quality review), etc..

Done in a rote fashion, following your checklist will tend to say "there are lots of problems and lots of DEI is needed" irrespective of whether there are actually problems.

Furthermore, the "inclusion" bit is--as usual--woefully neglected here compared to diversity. There are decades of psychological research on how to include people, ranging from team-building exercises to control of salience of different cues. A heavy focus on drawing distinctions between people along group boundaries is one of the worst things you could possibly do for inclusion. It's all "focus group this", "underrepresented group that" and "DEI listening session there". It's not "focus on the mission and how we can each contribute", it's not "build trust and cooperation through fast-paced goal-oriented games", it's not "tools for eliciting feedback from people who usually don't like to speak up". You get the best inclusion when the boundaries you draw draws everyone in, not when you have a federation of distinct groups defending their own status. Rather than working out the important-for-diversity but distinction-emphasizing stuff in the background, out of sight, so employees can embrace the inclusiveness part, "DEI" efforts too often task the people who should be working together inclusively with chopping each other apart and thinking about whether their own bit of the diversity puzzle has a large enough piece. This is backwards, if you take inclusion seriously.

Of course, you do need to hear from people if you're going to find the diversity problems (and the inclusion problems). So it's a tricky balance. But the scale usually ends up heavily tilted against inclusion because, among other things, diversity is easy to measure.

The issue isn't that companies don't have problems with all these things. Of course they do. Sometimes. In some places.

The issue is that all too often, DEI is not structured to do better than return the result, "Society sucks, therefore your company is bad and needs to do better," pretty much regardless of the relative quality of the company.

If DEI could come to grips with that problem and have hard-nosed metrics for its own effectiveness, companies would be far less likely to blow it off with lip service.