A longtime Philly workforce leader says the pullback from DEI is ‘troubling’ but expects a shift back
Recent steps backward are “sobering,” OIC Philadelphia CEO Sheila Ireland says, but “the pendulum always swings back and forth.”
Sheila Ireland has spent a career of more than three decades focused on getting people trained for jobs and creating paths into the workforce. Most recently, she’s done so as president and CEO of OIC Philadelphia.
OIC Philadelphia, the training center that eventually spawned a national organization, was founded in 1964 by the Rev. Leon Sullivan, longtime leader of Zion Baptist Church in North Philadelphia. “He wanted to level the playing field,” said Ireland.
OIC sits in North Philadelphia, where, Ireland notes, the community has lower educational attainment and less wealth than some other parts of the city. From that vantage point, she says, “How can you make the assumption we’re all starting at the same starting line?”
Following the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, efforts to address those systemic inequities received more attention. Now, as corporations step back from their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and President Donald Trump eliminates federal DEI programs, Ireland spoke with The Inquirer about the impact these programs have made and what she expects for the future. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.
As more companies invested in DEI efforts in the past decade or so, has the landscape changed?
We haven’t made as much progress as we’d like to think. We’re moving in the right direction. But equal pay for equal work — we’re not there, right?
[At OIC,] we’re trying to prepare people for work. So I’m pleased to say we’re moving forward in that. But the things we need to talk about are in managerial, supervisory roles. From locally up to our country, are we diverse? No, we’re not and certainly not in the rooms where the big decisions are being made.
[Sullivan] would have enjoyed seeing the worker agency increase, where people are now still compelled to make real decisions about where they want to work and why, that your quality of life is important.
The sobering thing is that … we’re still going, “Hmm.” Or worse, entertaining taking steps back.
What are your thoughts on the Trump administration eliminating DEI programs and the moves by numerous large corporations to roll those programs back?
If you watch history, the pendulum always swings back and forth. You never stay in one spot and always swing one way or another.
Diversity is about more than skin color. [These programs] also led to this sort of collaborative, innovative, creative economy that we see that makes us who we are. In the attempt to strip rights from some people, you wind up stripping them from all people.
There seems to be misunderstanding about what DEI programs do. What is the simplest way to define it?
If you could take an introspective look at yourself — regardless of where you are — we all have barriers. We all have objections that other people might make to us being in any room it is we want to enter. White, Black, old, young, whatever it is, right? There’s always an objection. In the diversity, equity, and inclusion conversation, we ask: Are those objections real? And can we put a lens on this so we understand what we are doing and why?
It’s easy for someone to point to me and say, “Well, you’re an African American female, of course you’ve experienced some things.” But everyone in my life has experienced some things. You might be a white male, but [according to some people] you don’t have the right educational background or you’re not in the right social class, or you don’t have the same network. What I think diversity, equity, and inclusion does for most is work to address our blinders. So if you hear people around you saying, “Oh, I see everyone the same,” No, no one sees everyone the same.
I’m trying to get people to understand, basically, how to get along. And I don’t know a simpler way to say it because we better learn how to get along.
We’ve also seen some examples of organizations vowing to continue their DEI programs, like Costco. Could we see more of this?
I think so. [The president] can sign whatever he wants, but that does not mean — in a government for the people by the people — that he has the right to change some of those issues. It’s political posturing.
Poor federal judges — they’re going to be really busy.
A lot of the backlash has been around that specific term — DEI. Might this work continue under another name?
Definitely. It’s the same way we had to stop calling [the Affordable Care Act] Obamacare. … It’s not what we say; it’s what we do.
It will continue. It just will show up differently.
Will we see movement in the workforce toward values that are important to workers, including diversity, equity, and inclusion?
We’re seeing that now. This [youngest] generation [of workers] is much more cognizant of who you are as an employer. They care who you are as an organization. I applaud the way [they] look at things.
What do you predict for the future of this work?
Near term it’s going to be rough. I’m sitting in a number of spaces where we’re having this conversation around what’s going to happen if we don’t remove the language about what we’re doing. It’s troubling — the immediate near-term witch hunt around everyone who has [DEI in their] title.
In the near term people fear, people run for cover, and then the pendulum swings the other way.
[Corporate leaders] cannot hide any longer. This is not corporate America of 30 years ago where decisions are made in the room and no one knows what’s going on. Everybody wants to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.