Why would a multibillion-dollar healthcare company fire a white male executive for no cause, only to replace him with a black woman weeks later?
Because the company’s Diversity and Inclusion Executive Council told them to, that’s why.
And while the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the fired executive is entitled to millions of dollars in damages for racial discrimination, DEI executives throughout corporate America can still make similar decisions. But it has now been revealed that the research that backed up the Diversity and Inclusion Executive Council’s efforts is completely bogus.
Starting in 2015, the McKinsey & Company consulting firm started publishing a series of studies purporting to show that “companies that have more diverse leadership teams are more successful.” These McKinsey studies, with titles such as “Diversity wins: How inclusion matters,” claimed to show with empirical data that companies with more racial diversity among top executives financially outperformed companies with little executive racial diversity.
These results were eagerly publicized and shared by left-liberal media including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Even the Harvard Business Review parroted the findings.
Companies that then cited the studies to justify their DEI efforts included Apple, Ford, Intel, J.P. Morgan, and Raytheon. The studies were even relied on by the Department of Defense to justify its push for a more racially diverse officer corps.
The author of these McKinsey studies, Vivian Hunt, once explained why her research was so important. “Neutral is no longer neutral. A neutral position, that is meritocratic, that it is good to treat people evenly, isn’t good enough,” she said in 2020. “You have to proactively stand for an anti-racism environment.”
Proactively standing for an anti-racist environment is what led Novant Health to fire Senior Vice President David Duvall for no cause in 2018. That year, Novant had seven white male vice presidents, but by 2021, it had only one. Novant’s DEI council got what it wanted.
But McKinsey’s research justifying racial discrimination was unsound all along. Two economists at Texas A&M University and the University of North Carolina asked McKinsey for their data to replicate the results of their studies and were denied access. The two economists then created their own datasets of executive diversity and financial outcomes in an attempt to replicate McKinsey’s findings, and their results found no relationship whatsoever between racial composition and financial performance. They published their results in the Econ Journal Watch last month. McKinsey has so far declined to defend its work.
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It does not speak well of corporate and government elites that they were so easily and eagerly duped by McKinsey’s racial flimflam. McKinsey’s own materials claim DEI works because it “brings multiple perspectives to the table during times when enhanced problem-solving skills and vision are needed.” But does skin color bring diversity? If a company’s executives all went to the same elite schools and were indoctrinated with the same woke worldview, how “diverse” can they be no matter what their skin colors are? Is diversity of melanin a proxy for diversity of opinion? Of course not.
Hiring, firing, and promoting people according to skin color is morally wrong, and no matter what the alleged experts at McKinsey tell you, it does not lead to financial success either.