Welcome to another new year dear reader. It was an absolute pleasure to write with you in 2024, we are looking forward to a brilliant 2025.
Last year was a packed year. There was so much done, so many tools created, so many ideas evolving or cancelled, so many horrible and beautiful things done. Governments come and governments go; policies made and policies changed; advancement and retrogression in all spheres; wars started and wars ended; economic ups and downs (very very plenty downs).
The most important part was that we saw it and did it all together. No race or group experienced more hardship than the other. We suffered, laughed and lived together. It’s beautiful to see that when the world faces its hardest times people tend to come closer together, to form tighter bonds that last for life. The growth and development of diversity, equity and inclusion happened organically, without policy or government intervention as if nature was trying to say, ‘that’s how I expect you all to live.’
Now we are in a new year; with new plans to make, new strategies to be drawn, new ideas to debate, new policies to make etc., but where does DEI come in in all of these things? Are companies still interested in fashioning DEI into their plans and strategy? Or do they see it as some nuisance that we should all pretend never happened? What about technology? Has it been helpful or harmful to the advancement of DEI? Are AI tools becoming as biased as their creators or more objective? What is new and what are we migrating to the trash in 2025?
We aim to clear it all out in this article.
If we were a sane society Diversity, Equity and Inclusion would not be a hotpoint to discuss. It wouldn’t be a policy or idea to be debated. If society were less perverse the default idea behind our lives would DEI. Because we would treat everyone as human beings, created by God and innately valuable; diverse in skill and heart but similar in experience and almost everything else.
Are companies still interested in DEI?
In the year 2023 and 2024 DEI was all the rage for western companies. Due to pressure from human rights groups, human rights activists and government policies companies were ‘forced’ to add DEI (whatever version of it they could put together) into their policies and strategies.
There was a spike in the amount of women being hired as Women’s representation at the entry level rose from 45% in 2015 to 48% in 2024, while in manager roles it rose from 37% to 39% according to a mckinsey report. Women occupy 29% of C-suite roles, up from 17% in 2015. Also In May, 75.7% of all women aged 25-54 were working — a record high.
There has also been a spike in the number of working women who have children below 18 years of age. This is largely due to advancement and adoption of remote work and online jobs that allow more women to earn. For talents living with disabilities in the US, among workers ages 16-64, the 6,077,000 workers with disabilities represented 4.1 percent of the total 149,872,000 workers in the U.S. In the UK the numbers aren’t impressive. The number of working-age persons with disability has increased by 580,000 in the year. This means that the 0.1 percentage point increase in the disability economic inactivity rate equates to an increase of 260,000 in the number of economically inactive persons with disability between Q2 2023 and Q2 2024
The disability employment gap was 28.6 percentage points in Q2 2024. This is a decrease of 0.6 percentage points on the year (this change was not statistically significant).
Big strides were made but will they continue in 2025? We can only hope. As more companies begin to stop remote work and implement full on-site activities, it will be increasingly harder for some people to keep their jobs. For example pregnant or nursing mothers, people with disabilities and minority groups due to race issues. DEI has also received some bad PR in the closing part of the year 2024. With incidents like the Boeing shutting down its entire DEI team due to racial hiring quotas. The pressure keeps heaping as X (formerly twitter) owner Elon Musk blames Boeing’s prioritization of DEI over hiring qualified workers leading to the two fatal incidents with their 737 Max Model jets.
Other companies have started to question the point of DEI in the organisation. Some commentators have clamored that the ROI to expense on DEI policies are not worth it. On the side of organisations DEI may have a tough 2025. Companies who understand that DEI is not about fulfilling quotas but giving everyone a chance on the basis of value, will undoubtedly continue to thrive.
Technology
The rise of AI opens up a ton of opportunities for companies in implementing new hiring and management policies that were free from biases and allowed everyone to work conveniently. AI tools built to take over or support HR teams in their hiring process emerged and made life a lot easier for everyone. Those tools have now evolved to better support their use cases. Tools like Seekout, Fetcher (for fetching candidates for open roles), Hirevue (for automating interviews), Textio (that allows job description to be created in more inclusive language). Assisted chatbox tools like Leena AI (automates HR queries and ticket processing) and ChatGPT have played a significant role in ensuring DEI policies are actualized in 2024 and will be instrumental in 2025.
There have also been reports of AI biases. To give a brief definition; AI hiring bias occurs when an AI model unfairly or inaccurately favors or disapproves of certain candidates. This bias can lead AI tools to reject qualified candidates for reasons that are completely unrelated to job performance, such as race or gender.
While automation can boost efficiency and some claim it can make the hiring process less discriminatory. But new University of Washington research found significant racial, gender and intersectional bias in how three state-of-the-art large language models, or LLMs, ranked resumes. The researchers varied names associated with white and Black men and women across over 550 real-world resumes and found the LLMs favored white-associated names 85% of the time, female-associated names only 11% of the time, and never favored Black male-associated names over white male-associated names.
Previous studies have found ChatGPT exhibits racial and disability bias when sorting resumes. But those studies were relatively small — using only one resume or four job listings — and ChatGPT’s AI model is a so-called “black box,” limiting options for analysis.
What’s in it for DEI in 2025?
DEI in 2025 will need to step into the boxing ring. There would be too many battles to fight inorder to stay alive and relevant. Something we believe proponents are used to.
We hope that in 2025 DEI evolves from an ideology into its original state, which is basic humanity. No more quota focused companies using the DEI as an umbrella for their ineptitude and giving the ideology a bad reputation.
In the aspect of AI tools and technology; we tend to forget as people that AI and its adoption is relatively new. A lot of strides have been made, but more needs to be done. The large language models being used need to pass through a lot of scrutiny by experts before it is passed on for use. This way there are checks and impact is duly measured.
