Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI)
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
What is diversity?
- Diversity, equity, and inclusion in one package
- Diversity pays off only in an inclusive culture
- Equity = fairness that considers circumstances
Adopting DEI isn’t about hanging slogans on the company bulletin board. It means redrawing the baselines for hiring, evaluation, and promotion. That might mean replacing interviews where every candidate gets different questions with a structured question set, or adding a step where department heads review the distribution by gender, tenure, and work arrangement before performance ratings are finalized. Meetings get adjusted too, so that speaking order doesn’t simply follow rank. If the wording of your policies doesn’t change, DEI ends with a one-day workshop, and once that day is over, the organization snaps right back to where it started.
The line between equality and equity is where practitioners most often get tangled. If giving every employee the same KRW 1 million (≈ US$750) training budget is equality, adding a technical retraining program for people returning after a career break is equity. The metrics sit on different layers too. Diversity shows up in visible numbers like workforce composition, but inclusion only shows up in sense-of-belonging survey scores and gaps in turnover rates between groups. If the share of women hires has risen but one group’s three-year attrition rate is still double, that organization has bought diversity but not inclusion.
The most common failure is chasing numbers. If a company sets only a target for the share of women executives and leaves its evaluation criteria and parental-leave work policies untouched, the people it promotes get singled out as “poster children,” pulled into committees and PR shoots until they burn out and leave. This is tokenism. Conversely, if the company settles for a single lecture-style awareness training, all that remains is backlash: “So you’re saying I’m the bad guy?” DEI is less a campaign than the ongoing maintenance of HR systems. Miss the point that what needs fixing is not people’s mindsets but the rules and practices that work against specific groups, and you’ll spend the budget and get only cynicism in return.
Anna ChoExpert in organizational culture, coaching, emotion management, and CS consulting
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of B2B Marketing DesignThe concept grew out of equality and human rights movements, and rose to a management priority alongside research linking organizational diversity to performance and innovation.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, an IT services firm with 1,200 employees, had 640 developers, of whom 18% were women and 42 were foreign engineers. When leadership dug into why engineering headcount stayed flat despite more hiring, they found that the voluntary attrition rate among women developers within their first three years was 22%, double the 11% for men. Leadership decided to spend six months examining the causes.
- When the head of HR reread 88 exit-interview records from the past three years, the statement 'after being cut off twice in a meeting, you stop speaking up the third time' appeared in nearly half of the records of women who left.
- The head of engineering changed the sprint retrospective rules: the most junior members speak first, two minutes each, and team leads speak last. They piloted it on four teams for eight weeks.
- For the 42 foreign engineers, we made deployment documents and incident-response manuals bilingual and assigned each a buddy for their first three months. The change came from feedback like “I follow the design meetings fine, but lunchtime is the loneliest part.”
- HR added rating distribution by work arrangement to the year-end performance calibration materials and asked at the team-leader meeting, 'why are there 0 reduced-hours parents among the 12 S-rated employees?' Afterward, it removed 'availability on demand' from the evaluation criteria.
- Eighteen months later, attrition among women developers with three or fewer years of tenure fell from 22% to 9%, one-year retention of foreign engineers rose from 68% to 91%, and the score for 'my opinion is reflected in decisions' rose from 3.1 to 3.9 on a 5-point scale.