From DEI to MEI: 5 Things You Need to Know

Move over DEI. There’s a new kid in town when it comes to hiring and promoting.

Enter MEI — merit, excellence and intelligence. It’s not to say DEI is dead. The pursuit to improve diversity, equity and inclusion at companies will likely continue.

But MEI is making some waves.

MEI, DEI in the Making

A brief history on MEI to start: Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang popularized the phrase earlier this year, explaining that his company would hire the best candidates for open roles without considering demographics. While it wasn’t a completely new phrase — or concept, for that matter — it picked up speed since then.

As far as DEI, it exploded in the wake of George Floyd’s death and civil unrest in 2020. In the following years, more companies committed to improve DEI efforts. From there, the DEI-related acronyms continued to evolve. But, as the initiatives and successes increased, DEI took a hit following the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action.

Now what?

We talked to experts who have some serious cred when it comes to HR best practices, DEI and the future of MEI.

Tessa West is the author of  Job Therapy: Finding Work That Works for You. She’s a professor of psychology at New York University and a leading expert in the science of interpersonal communication. She has studied DEI for 20 years and has published dozens of articles on the subject.

Jo McRell is the author of Making Work Work for You. After almost 20 years of leading DEI and corporate communication initiatives, she’s now a consultant focused on improving the employee experience and helping build bridges between company goals and evolving employee needs.

1. Why Are Companies Moving From DEI to MEI?

West: “The surge in DEI-based hiring practices that dominated the last four years are starting to wane, and there’s lots of reasons why. We can think of these as top down (laws that changed practices) and bottom up (people aren’t experiencing them in the ways as intended, so that changes laws). And a general trend started to happen: The practice of making things more inclusive got lost, as ideological beliefs started to dominate how we talk about DEI. 

“Top down, there’s been a lot of legal changes in these practices (like the Supreme Court ruling) that eventually trickle down to affect hiring in all sectors, regardless of whether the law applies to that sector or not. 

“Bottom up, the perception of how effective these practices are has really taken a hit. There was a wave of practices that felt exclusionary to people (the Robin Diangelo approach, for example) that weren’t based on social science. Many so-called experts infiltrated this space who weren’t actual experts; there was a boom of people who gave things like implicit bias training who aren’t experts in implicit bias.

“I study racial bias, and I saw this first-hand at multiple organizations, where I was left scratching my head as to why a particular person was brought in with very little vetting. And as a consequence, there’s very little evidence that these practices work. The strongest evidence in support of these practices is about making clear structural changes to improve inclusivity. “

McRell: “Some organizations have and will use the 2023 SCOTUS ruling on affirmative action to back down on DEI programs they already disagreed with. Some organizations have faced lawsuits and actions taken to challenge their DEI efforts.

“But in general, law experts tell us that the fundamentals of DEI — efforts like countering bias, creating psychologically safe work environments and investing in programs to offer more opportunity to a wider diversity of people — are legal and beneficial.”

2. Are There Advantages to an MEI Approach?

West: “The ‘best’ version of MEI is basically colorblind hiring, which has been around forever. At it’s best, it means that the pool of candidates that people are selected from is representative, and from this non-biased pool, the top candidates are selected. But to get to that stage –a representative pool — you do have to actively recruit from schools, or programs, that increase the chances that you get some talent that would otherwise not apply. You also have to be very careful about language in your job description to make sure it’s not accidentally excluding groups of people. So up until the actual vetting of resumes, you can’t ignore different groups.

“But often, even if we try to ignore demographics, there’s a ton of data that we use as proxies for it. There’s a reason why racial minorities whitewashed their resumes — it got them jobs! Our identities leak out of us in a lot of ways on our resumes, even if we don’t explicitly report it. Claiming that you ignore that stuff is foolish. You have to work hard to get it off of a resume — so I’d be curious what these MEI practices are that can actually accomplish that. Plus it is very easy to go onto LinkedIn and see a photo, or see someone’s gender pronouns. Most companies do this.”

3. Are There Drawbacks to an MEI Approach?

McRell: “Meritocracy doesn’t exist. We like to believe it does. We can and should strive to be fair and unbiased in our decisions. But this is an ideal, not the reality. Humans are biased by nature. Hierarchical power structures + human nature + money dynamics will produce bias every time. DEI programs help organizations counter bias, improve diversity of thought and ensure more employees perform at higher levels.

“Relying on MEI is naive and narrow in focus. It risks leaving a lot of talent off the table or more talent underperforming at a time when nine out of 10 executives say they are struggling with skill gaps. It also reinforces harmful myths that divide society and workers. Relying narrowly on concepts like merit, excellence and intelligence promotes the idea that leaders and ‘winners’ succeed solely based on their individual efforts or attributes and ignores the impact that our environments have.

“These challenges are then even bigger when we look at trends around generative AI (GenAI). Like many technology disruptions before, GenAI access and use is a story about haves and have-nots. OpenAI’s own statistics show that nearly 70% of its users are male, with only approximately 30% being female. Beyond gender, studies are starting to show alarming gaps around age, race and other dimensions.”

West: “The drawbacks? Most of the time bias creeps in because people aren’t that thoughtful about how to remove it. And then you get moral licensing: I did all of these things to remove it, so I can effectively let my hiring freak flag fly because I checked off the ‘I’m not biased’ box by removing demographic information.” 

4. How Can We Balance DEI and MEI?

McRell: “Now is the time to look forward, not backward. Falling back on the myth of meritocracy is not a path to long-term success. In our new era of AI disruption and the knowledge worker, we have both the opportunity and the need to relook at skills development as well as measures of productivity and success. As more organizations make the shift to skills-based hiring and development, we need to redefine what good looks like and the models for how we work. 

“Defining merit, excellence and intelligence today will depend on how we make the most of human talent in balance with AI. DEI can continue to help us increase talent pools and counter bias. It can help us make the most of AI’s potential — with humans in the loop.”

West: “You need to remove the bias through the systems and structures you use during your hiring stages. My WSJ piece outlines how. Yes, merit should absolutely matter — no one gets ahead through a competence downshift approach. It harms the people who are hired who are less qualified than their racial majority/male counterparts.”

5. How Can We Help Employees Succeed if MEI Grows?

West: “Highlighting merit is a good thing — and it’s critical for minorities to get ahead. There’s a ton of work on how being labeled the ‘diversity hire’ is quite harmful to people (note the competence downshift). Harness the merit part. You can also value diversity at work without making it ‘the dimension’ people are hired on. What you don’t want to do is to single people out based on their group memberships, or highlight their diversity status in settings that aren’t appropriate.” (I once was at a meeting where the company president asked a woman to stand up because she was the first female hire. Gross!) 

McRell: “In short, invest in people skills. More and more employers prioritize hires who demonstrate adaptability, resilience, growth mindset, people leadership, judgment or decision-making, emotional intelligence and relationship building, and the ability to check their biases. These people skills are even more critical as AI takes on a larger share of repetitive transactional work — enabling us to focus more on relational and transformative work. Managers who develop these skills for themselves and encourage growth around these people skills for their teams will be far ahead.”