Eliminating hard inclusivity goals won’t protect against discrimination complaints but it will help, legal specialists say.

Employment and discrimination law specialists have been telling their corporate clients for the past two years it’s possible to minimize their chance of getting hit with a discrimination lawsuit without abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion commitments by replacing their hard hiring goals with something aspirational. 

“A program that tries to establish a fixed goal — a quota — for minority hiring or minority contracting is going to be much more vulnerable than a plan that doesn’t use numerical targets,” Samir Deger-Sen, a Latham & Watkins partner, said in 2023, shortly after the Supreme Court shot down university race-conscious admissions policies as discriminatory. Even though the decision was about college admissions, critics say it helped pave the way for discrimination actions against DEI programs in business.  

In early January, the tech giant said it was disbanding its DEI team and scrapping its diverse slate approach to hiring, which requires hiring managers to include as many underrepresented candidates for jobs as possible.

The goal, at the time the approach was created about a decade ago, was to “hard wire” diversity into the company’s culture. “The more people you interview who don’t look or think like you, the more likely you are to hire someone from a diverse background,” Maxine Williams, the company’s then-global director of diversity, said at the time.

Explore HR Tech News for the latest advancements in Human Resources Technologies insightful updates from industry experts! 

Source : https://www.hrdive.com/news/meta-DEI-changes-fisher-phillips-latham-watkins/739017/