Woke-washing and Whac-A-Mole: Why diversity seems to go nowhere

I got both the terms in the headline from this article, with definitions including:

• Woke-washing: Appropriating the language of social justice into marketing materials. (See also: “Chasing Insta impressions.”)
• Whac-A-Mole: You know the game, but here’s the quote — > Kristine M., Global Operations at a major social network, notes that “companies attack areas of social injustice, diversity, and inclusion like a game of whack-a-mole — reactively addressing specific concerns as they come with no lasting impact.”

I’d say both these things are pretty accurate. While we are here and discussing this, let’s talk for a second about our girl Kelli:

Kelli wanted to be promoted and, theoretically, the promotion was justified. But instead of actually promoting a POC woman, the SVP level was holed up figuring out how they could appear “woke” to the customer market. Seems flawed, no?

The dirty little secret of the Whac-A-Mole problem

I think, sadly, that part of the reason diversity initiatives feel very “Whac-A-Mole” is that executives don’t care about them — they care about money — and as a result, they essentially want that area of the company to be very fire drill-laden. When someone is chasing tasks over the fence all day, nothing big picture or strategic can happen. Executives have been doing this to HR initiatives for literally decades at this point. Keep someone running and chasing, and nothing major needs to be addressed. It’s just rinse and repeat, calendar chaos, and five years later you look up and think “Well, shit, we still have 18 VPs and above, and they’re all white males.”

Woke-washing is a part of Shiny Object Syndrome

A lot of execs these days have kids in the Snap, TikTok, IG age realm. They probably hear about this shit at dinner and they think “Oh, that seems relevant. That’s where the next generation of consumers seems to be.” So then big stuff happens, and in reality executives don’t want to address these things because they’re not “business things” to them, but they know they must do something. Well, it seems like being woke on The Gram could look good, get impressions, and maybe get new customers down the line. Most of work is about shiny objects (in this case, The Gram), things you can control (in this case, your “diversity campaign rollout”), and making money (in this case, it’s a distant hope from the woke-washed posts).

In the meantime, Kelli is an actual African-American woman standing in front of you deserving more responsibility. But you’re too busy with the bullshit.

When you combine the two — “control the message!” and “task task task task must complete my diversity tasks!” — that’s essentially why we don’t advance these discussions in a bigger way.

Your take?

PS: For years, we’ve been saying that the key to diversity initiatives is tying it to the bottom line. I generally agree. However, the problem with diversity is that a lot of repercussions emerge from academic research, and executives do not care about academics. (“Ivory Tower eggheads. I get shit done. I scale.”) The other problem is that you can dismiss any revenue bumps tied to diversity as anecdotal. I actually was in a meeting once where McKinsey revenue numbers were mentioned re: diversity, and a SVP said, and I quoth, “That’s ridiculous. The gains were from the product suite, not a diverse team.” As long as VPs and up think that way, that’s the third leg of this problem.