The Importance of Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformation for the EFA

The Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), a prominent HR consultancy, recently removed “equity” from its program of diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI, leaving it as a promoter of what it calls I&D. Despite C-suite executives’ insistence to the contrary, many corporations, like CNN and Microsoft, are cutting back or restructuring their DEI programs. And a firestorm of targeted legislation has driven DEI out of many public institutions. As our co-chair, Andrea Reid, said in her recent Freelancer article, the campaign to eliminate Diversity, Equity and Inclusion now regularly grabs headlines. Any accounting of a DEI program has to face this context: intense hostility from anti-DEI activists and relative apathy from the corporate and nonprofit sector where DEI makes its home.

So, given this context, where does the EFA’s Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Transformation committee stand? Andrea asked me to write an article about positive stories in DEI, and at first glance I had a difficult time finding any. However, I think we should start by putting the backlash against DEI in context.

Much like “wokeness” and “critical race theory,” the concept of “DEI” has been divorced from its actual, often modest origins. There’s an argument to be made that as deployed by social reactionaries, DEI can be a stalking horse for equality itself. It isn’t a set of HR guidelines, diversity training, or college scholarships—I’m afraid that what’s being called into question is the equal treatment of women, the poor, people of color, LGBTQ people, immigrants, and anyone else who has gained an inch of societal advancement in the past two hundred years.

That is also why I think it’s critical to stand up for DEI now. My political stance is probably more radical than most of my colleagues in EDIT, and I think that many DEI programs are inadequate substitutes for more sweeping organizational and political changes. But wiping out DEI is the opposite of what we should hope to accomplish. I think we should seek to see these programs broadened and systematized, consolidated into something that can outlast the wavering of an individual organization. And the good news is, despite the so-called “war on woke,” there is growing evidence that many people feel the same way.

Take the impact of the anti-DEI movement on public education, one of the clearest manifestations of its underlying goals. Legislation in Texas and Florida has gone far beyond simply banning DEI departments in public universities, actually seeking to implement sweeping restrictions on the speech of faculty and staff. In Florida, this has accomplished its intended chilling effect, although the legislation itself is now tied up in the courts. Even though some professors now plan to violate anti-DEI laws, and some DEI-related departments in public universities have continued their work as independent nonprofits, the atmosphere of fear and loss of institutional legitimacy and public funding are major blows.

However, more blatant attempts at limiting speech and censoring information have been widely unpopular. At a school board meeting in Brevard County, Florida, on January 23, a single supporter of the right-wing Moms for Liberty group sat in favor of banning the books The Kite Runner and Slaughterhouse-Five, while twenty speakers, including some organized by the counter-group Stop Moms for Liberty, voiced their opposition. After its explosive growth during the pandemic, Moms for Liberty has faced drastic blowback throughout 2023 and 2024, with the majority of its preferred candidates losing their elections and a major scandal embroiling one of its co-founders.

Jennifer C. Berkshire, an education activist, contends that the arguments and sense of division sowed by group like Moms for Liberty are actually the point of their movement, not their ostensible policy agenda. By stirring constant controversy, people will be driven away from public education. I think this is broadly true across the board for the anti-DEI movement. While it is worth questioning whether some types of DEI initiatives actually do enough, the deeper goal of anti-DEI activists is to drive people away from collective action and support for equality and diversity, and it doesn’t seem to be working.

Even as corporations and major bureaucratic institutions like universities step back from DEI, we should keep in mind that the majority of attempts at passing reactionary legislation have failed, even as state legislatures pivot from “critical race theory” to “DEI” as the target du jour. It only takes one bill to inflict major damage, but the core goals of the race to political reaction appear to be durably unpopular once they are actually exposed.

So again, why EDIT? Because, even if DEI by itself isn’t enough, the goal of the DEI backlash is to drive people out of the public sphere and exploit narrow targets like “diversity training” as an excuse to tear down diversity; to exclude not only the “equity” of DEI, as the HR group SHRM has, but equality itself. The EFA is not a political organization and is responsible for the needs of all of its members, regardless of their political stances, but I believe that we can and should send a contrary message: we support equity, we support diversity, and we support inclusion, and we will undertake the transformation needed as an organization to ensure that commitment is more than words.

Work remains to be done. While diversity cannot be reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s worth considering that according to our 2020 Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion survey (EFA login required), the organization is 86% white. It is also, interestingly, 84% female, although this is consistent with the editorial field as a whole and its status as generally undervalued, underpaid labor. In that regard, I would also note that our initiatives have tended to overlook class. This is somewhat unavoidable, as we are by our nature an organization for members of the same profession, but as many of us know, a major reason to go freelance is the drastically increased earning potential and the decline of stable, well-paid institutional editing jobs. Entry-level editorial assistants often make around $35–40,000 per year, placing them in the bottom quartile nationwide, and the industry is overwhelmingly concentrated in New York City, the most expensive city in the United States. Worse, a large amount of work in our field is now done remotely by non-American workers being paid a fraction of the United States’ living wage. I believe that we could reach out to these people, and this is an opportunity for solidarity rather than competition.

All of that being said, the work of the EFA and the EDIT committee can help us take a first step down that path. The Ruth Mullen Memorial Scholarship is a commendable initiative for addressing racial inequity in our field, and I hope we can continue to help bring in DEB (Diversity, Equity, and Belonging)-related classes, webinars, and speakers, as well as produce resources for the EFA membership and help to open the floor for conversations. This has already led to a recognition that we should be doing more to support non-native English speakers. I am hopeful that the work of the EDIT committee will continue to expand, to work together with EFA membership and leadership to support a world where equity, diversity, and inclusion are not dirty words but our highest aspiration.

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Gabriel Rodriguez, Member
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion & Transformation (EDIT) Committee