Donald Trump has assailed diversity, inclusion and equity initiatives as has fellow 2024 GOP frontrunner Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while the Biden administration and Democratic leaders have championed them.
As the nation’s racial reckoning takes center stage in the run-up to the presidential election, those pitched culture battles are being felt in the workplace where sharp partisan divisions are emerging.
Call it the DEI divide.
Most Democratic and Democratic-leaning workers – 78% – say focusing on DEI at work is a good thing, according to a new survey from the Pew Research Center. Just 30% of Republicans and Republican-leaning workers felt the same. What’s more, 30% of Republicans said DEI was a bad thing.
“The findings suggest that the political polarization and the party divides that we see across different realms of life also exist in the workplace,” said Kim Parker, director of social and demographics trends research at Pew Research. “The fact that these DEI efforts and policies have now become a point of national debate, those differences are getting reinforced.”
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With the nation becoming less white and more studies showing that diversity gives companies a competitive edge, corporate America has prioritized hiring and promoting more workers from underrepresented backgrounds and has embraced initiatives to make work cultures more inclusive. Those efforts don’t sit well with everyone, and they have opened up fault lines in cubicles and corner offices across the country.
Strikingly, Parker says Pew Research studies examining work culture and people’s attitudes about work did not find such wide gaps by party affiliation.
“So there are aspects of work that people are experiencing in very similar ways regardless of their party affiliation,” Parker said. “But when it comes to this specific set of policies and initiatives, you do start to see the divisions.”
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About half of Democrats say working somewhere that has diversity – including gender, race and ethnicity, age and sexual orientation – is extremely or very important to them, but just 13% of Republicans agree.
An equal mix of men and women in the workplace is extremely or very important to 39% of Democrats but only to 12% of Republicans.
Similar divides exist on having people from different age groups (39% versus 17%) and different sexual orientations in the workplace (27% versus 7%).
Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say their workplace benefits from policies and programs focused on diverse representation and workplace inclusion. In fact, 21% of Democrats say their employer pays too little attention to DEI.
Republicans, on the other hand, are far more likely than Democrats to say their employer pays too much attention to DEI (24% versus 6%).
Democrats are more than three times as likely as Republicans to say being white makes it easier to succeed where they work (48% versus 13%) and they are more likely than Republicans to say being Black, Hispanic or Asian makes it harder.
There is also a partisan split on whether women and people of color face additional hurdles in the workplace.
Nearly half of Democrats – 47% – say being a man makes it at least somewhat easier to succeed at work compared with 25% of Republicans.
Democrats are also more likely than Republicans to say being a woman makes it harder to succeed (37% versus 17%).
Democratic and Republican women are more likely than men of either party to agree that being a man helps drive success.
Just 9% of Republicans say being Black makes it harder for someone to succeed compared with 39% of Democrats.
Similarly, 30% of Democrats view being Hispanic as a barrier to success versus 8% of Republicans. Smaller shares in both political parties say being Asian makes it tougher to succeed (16% versus 6%).
