The backlash is real, the budget pressure is real, and the evidence on programme effectiveness is mixed. Here is an honest assessment of where DEIB stands and what it is worth investing in.
The DEIB conversation in 2026 requires more precision and more honesty than it received in the years that preceded it.
The question is being asked with increasing frequency and increasing frankness: given the political backlash in several markets, the budget pressure on HR functions globally, the mixed evidence on programme effectiveness, and the well-documented failure of many DEIB initiatives to produce the equity outcomes they claimed to be pursuing, is DEIB still worth doing? The honest answer is: yes, but not in the way most organisations have been doing it, and not with the same justification frameworks that the field has been using. The case for DEIB in 2026 is stronger than it has ever been on the evidence. The case for the specific DEIB model that most organisations have been running is weaker than it has ever been. These two statements are not contradictory. They are, in fact, the most important distinction available to any L&D or HR leader trying to make a principled decision about where to invest.
Let me be specific about what I mean by “not the way most organisations have been doing it.” The dominant DEIB model of the last decade has been characterised by four features: a primary focus on representation metrics as the principal measure of success; a heavy investment in awareness training as the primary intervention; a tendency to treat DEIB as a separate function rather than an integrated dimension of all people management practice; and a reliance on aspiration and values language rather than specific, measurable behavioural change targets. Each of these features has contributed to a gap between investment and outcome that critics of DEIB are right to name, even if their proposed response, which is typically to abandon DEIB investment entirely, is wrong. The problem is not that equity and inclusion are not worth pursuing. The problem is that the model being used to pursue them has been, in significant respects, poorly designed.
The Legitimate Concerns
A productive engagement with the DEIB backlash requires naming what the critics are right about, rather than dismissing the backlash entirely as politically motivated, which some of it is, and some of it is not. The critics are right that MANDATORY AWARENESS TRAINING has not produced the outcomes it claimed to produce. As documented elsewhere in this series, the evidence on mandatory bias training is consistent in its finding that it does not increase management diversity and in some cases produces backlash. Defending this model because it signals commitment to inclusion is not a defence of inclusion. It is a defence of a programme that has been marketed as advancing inclusion while failing to do so.
The critics are also right that REPRESENTATION METRICS HAVE BEEN SUBSTITUTED FOR BELONGING OUTCOMES. An organisation that has improved its gender representation at senior levels while maintaining a culture in which women report significantly lower belonging, lower psychological safety, and higher attrition intent than their male colleagues, has not produced what it set out to produce. The representation number went up. The equity did not. Treating the representation number as the primary success metric has allowed organisations to claim DEIB progress while the daily experience of the people the programme was supposed to help remained largely unchanged. This is a legitimate criticism, and the DEIB field needs to own it rather than deflecting it.
The critics are right, third, that DEIB has sometimes been used as a marketing instrument rather than a development one: organisations that have invested heavily in external DEIB communications and brand positioning while underinvesting in the internal cultural and structural changes required to produce genuine equity. The gap between the external brand and the internal reality is visible to the employees who live inside it, and it produces a specific and corrosive form of cynicism that is harder to recover from than the simple absence of a DEIB programme would have been. The field needs to be honest about this pattern and to distinguish clearly between DEIB as organisational development and DEIB as reputation management.
The Case for DEIB
The case for DEIB, properly designed and rigorously measured, remains robust. The McKinsey Diversity Wins research, the most comprehensive available on the relationship between diversity and financial performance, has now tracked the same relationship across three editions and continues to find a significant positive correlation between ethnic and gender diversity at senior levels and financial performance, controlling for industry and size. The correlation has, if anything, strengthened across editions. The mechanism is not diversity as a box-ticking exercise; it is the cognitive diversity, the breadth of perspective and experience, that diverse teams bring to complex problems. This cognitive diversity advantage is real, it is measurable, and it is the most compelling business case for diversity investment that is available because it describes what diversity does rather than what it signals.
The case for belonging investment is equally robust at the talent management level. In India’s current talent market, characterised by high competition for senior talent and significant attrition pressure in knowledge-intensive sectors, the belonging data is directly material to business performance. BetterUp’s research on belonging and performance shows a 56 per cent reduction in turnover intention among employees who rate belonging as high. In the context of the cost of senior-level attrition in Indian corporates, which typically runs to twelve to eighteen months of the departing employee’s total compensation in recruitment, onboarding, and productivity loss, the financial case for belonging investment is not soft. It is one of the highest-return HR investments available, if the belonging programme is designed to produce actual belonging rather than belonging awareness.
The case for STRUCTURAL EQUITY WORK, the audit and redesign of processes that systematically advantage certain populations in hiring, promotion, assignment, and sponsorship, is perhaps the strongest of all, because the evidence on structural interventions is more consistent than the evidence on attitudinal ones. Blind CV review, structured interviews, standardised promotion criteria, equitable sponsorship tracking: these structural changes reduce the influence of bias in decision-making without requiring attitudinal change in the decision-makers, and they produce measurable equity outcomes faster than any awareness programme operating alone. The organisations that have produced the most durable equity progress are, almost universally, the ones that invested in structural change alongside, not instead of, attitudinal development.
What Changed
The DEIB field has learned, somewhat slowly, that behavioural specificity is more effective than attitudinal aspiration. The shift from “be more inclusive” to “perform these specific behaviours” has produced measurably better outcomes in the programmes that have made it. The shift from mandatory to voluntary engagement has reduced backlash and improved programme quality in the organisations that have implemented it. The shift from representation as the primary metric to belonging behaviour as the primary metric has produced more accurate and more actionable data for the organisations that have made it. These are genuine improvements in the field’s design capability, and they are worth acknowledging alongside the honest assessment of what has not worked.
What the field still needs to learn, and what most organisations have not yet acted on, is that DEIB cannot be effective as a separate function. The belonging behaviours described in this series are not DEIB behaviours. They are leadership behaviours, management behaviours, and team behaviours that produce equity outcomes when they are performed consistently and undermine equity outcomes when they are not. The sponsorship equity gap is not a DEIB problem. It is a management effectiveness problem. The promotion process bias is not a DEIB problem. It is an HR process design problem. The belonging deficit in certain populations is not a DEIB problem. It is a team culture problem that sits squarely within the remit of every line manager in the organisation. DEIB that positions itself as a specialist function, separate from leadership development and management effectiveness, will always be fighting for budget and legitimacy against the functions that are positioned as central to the business. DEIB that positions itself as the equity dimension of all people management practice, integrated into every leadership development investment and every HR process design, is not a separate function. It is the quality standard by which everything else is evaluated.
“The question is not whether DEIB is worth doing. The question is whether the organisation is willing to do DEIB in the way the evidence shows it works, which is harder, slower, more structural, and less immediately legible than the model most organisations have been using.”
RK, Founder & Principal Consultant, ProventusHRResearch Reference
McKinsey & Company (2020). Diversity Wins: How Inclusion Matters. Dobbin, F. & Kalev, A. (2022). Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t. Harvard University Press. Mercer (2025). Global Talent Trends: DEIB Investment Intentions.
The ProventusHR Perspective
ProventusHR’s DEIB practice in 2026 is built around three commitments that reflect the field’s accumulated learning. First, we design for behavioural outcomes rather than awareness outcomes. Every ProventusHR DEIB intervention produces a set of specific, named, measurable behaviour changes as its primary success metric. Second, we design for structural change alongside attitudinal development, and we are direct with commissioning organisations about the fact that attitudinal development without structural change will not produce the equity outcomes the organisation is seeking. Third, we position our DEIB work as an integrated dimension of leadership effectiveness rather than as a specialist function, which means our DEIB programmes are designed in explicit connection with our leadership development programmes rather than as a separate track.
For organisations that are questioning whether to continue DEIB investment, ProventusHR’s recommendation is to begin with an honest audit of what previous DEIB investment has produced in terms of specific, measurable equity outcomes. This audit is not designed to justify past investment. It is designed to build an accurate picture of what has and has not worked, from which a more targeted and more evidence-based future investment can be designed. In most cases, the audit reveals that the awareness programmes produced awareness, the representation metrics improved modestly, and the daily experience of belonging for people from non-dominant groups improved marginally or not at all. This is useful information. It tells the organisation exactly where the investment gap is and what a more productive investment would address.
On the question of whether DEIB is “still worth doing,” ProventusHR’s honest answer is direct: it depends entirely on what you mean by DEIB. Mandatory awareness training is not worth doing, and the evidence has been saying so for a decade. Voluntary, skill-building, behaviourally-specific, structurally-integrated equity work is worth doing, and the evidence is equally clear on this. The organisations that will produce genuine equity progress in the next five years are not the ones that abandon DEIB under political and budget pressure. They are the ones that redesign it in response to the evidence, with the courage to invest in what is harder and the honesty to stop investing in what has not worked.
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