In this episode, the conversation centers around the recent executive orders under the new administration that are related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in the workplace, and their impact on organizations. Michelle provides an overview of who is affected by these orders, focusing on federal agencies, contractors, and organizations receiving federal funding. She emphasizes the importance for leaders to stay informed, consulting employment attorneys to understand the implications for their specific organizations. Michelle highlights key takeaways, and how companies can begin to navigate these new orders.

The episode also covers additional mandates specific to federal agencies and contractors, notably around gender recognition and intimate spaces. Michelle provides guidance on how organizations can navigate these challenges while upholding DEI commitments. She encourages organizations to consult legal counsel to assess risks and develop strategies.

If you're interested in the resources that Michelle discussed, visit: https://www.equity-at-work.com/

I'm Michelle Bogan, founder and CEO of Equity at Work, and this is your DEI Minute, your go to podcast for leaders looking to navigate the ever evolving landscape of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace. Whether you're just starting out with DEI or looking to sustain your long term successes, each episode will provide you with actions you can take to move DEI forward at your organization, all in fifteen minutes or less. Hi, everybody. In today's episode, I wanna take you through some of the key takeaways on the executive orders on DEI in the workplace. There has been a ton of chaos and confusion and fear that has come out in The US related to these executive orders. So we've spent a lot of time going through them in a great deal of detail. We've gone through them with some employment attorneys and with other experts and wanna give you some of the key takeaways. Of course, I will say this multiple times throughout this episode.

If you have any doubt about how if or how these orders impact you, please be sure to talk to either your general counsel or to an employment attorney to make sure you're totally clear, but we will give you some overall guidance. And hopefully, this does help provide some clarity on what you do and don't need to be concerned about. And I will also preface preface this by saying there have been a lot of lawsuits already filed related to this, so I'm sure that these things will change. They will morph and evolve. I'm sure if things are turned down at one stage, they'll probably be appealed, and there may be a long process before we know exactly how the courts will finally interpret these different orders and what will stay in place. So, be sure to sort of check, you know, the latest updates and latest news. We will continue to post updates on our website and on our newsletters so you can go there sign up for our newsletter on equity-@-work.com and check our website blog we will always keep updates there, but just be sure and, really stay up to speed on these because things are changing pretty rapidly. Okay.

So first, I wanna talk about who is impacted. And, again, I'm just focused on the impact of these orders on DI in the workplace, not broadly outside of the workplace. So keep that in mind as I take you through these. The primary focus for these orders is on federal agencies, federal contractors, and organizations that receive federal funding. And on that last one, I know, you know, we've had some clients have a little bit of confusion there because they may get a little bit of federal funding or they may get state funding for some of their work that is partly funded by the federal government kind of upstream. So you've really gotta make sure you understand, like, sort of where the dollars are coming from ultimately so that you know how much of this impacts you. So then in addition to those organizations, it's also identified in one of the orders that for publicly traded corporate organizations, for nonprofits that have a certain level of endowment, I think it's 500,000,000 or more, same with foundations, barring medical associations, and then higher education institutions, which have a billion dollars in endowments or more funding or more. Each government agency can identify, and that's at a federal level, can identify up to nine potential organizations within each of those segments to investigate, to see if if they're doing any illegal DEI activity.

So it's as of right now, that's just nine. They can identify up to nine. It doesn't mean they'll definitely do nine. It doesn't I don't know if that means it'll be nine now and nine more later. But, you know, they're really going after the largest of those, probably the the best, you know, the biggest names, the most highly funded, etcetera, that are, you know, not following what the rest of the executive order is talking about. And if you're interested again, on our website, we have a a, you know, summary of this as well as a very detailed breakdown of which statutes apply to which parts of you know, which segment you're in from as as an organization. So be sure and go there to get more information. So getting into some of the key statutes, one really great piece of news is that title seven of the Civil Rights Act still stands for private employers.

So that prevents workplace discrimination, harassment, and any other sort of negative treatment based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. There's been a modification to the definition of sex, and I'll get to that in a minute. But overall, that act still stands in that title, title seven of the civil rights act does stay in place for private employers. So that's really good news. So you can't discriminate based on those protected classes, race, color, religion, sex, national origin. Then for every organization that's in the scope of the orders, here are the primary things that are called out. You cannot have quotas. Now we already would tell our clients that quotas are a bad idea.

That does not mean that you cannot have aspirations and goals around adding more diversity to your organization or more diversity to specific levels or roles or functions within your organization. What it does mean is you can't say when we go out to hire, we need one black employee, one disabled employee, one female employee, and one LGBTQ plus employee. That's targeting. That's quotas. That's saying I have this hole and I need it filled by this type of person regardless of their qualifications and and everything else, skill set, etcetera. So no quotas, but still, absolutely, you can have goals around diversity of your organization. No preferred hiring, staffing, or promotions of employees based on a protected class. Again this is something we're already telling clients not to do.

However you what you should be doing is making sure that all of those processes and those policies have been scrubbed. To ensure that as much bias as possible has been taken out of them. So you've got good checks and balances. You've got a diverse set of employees internally, participating in those decision making processes. You've got some oversight happening there, and and you're just making sure you're not giving anyone preferential treatment or overly biased treatment that's holding them back. No labeling or assigning employees as privileged. I don't think anyone likes to be labeled anything. So I would say that is a good thing to not be not be doing.

It's not something we would counsel clients to do anyway. So just making sure nobody's sort of being stamped a particular a a label related to privilege. Similarly, not rating employees on a racism or bias scale. I think there have been some trainings out there that have happened where people take kind of, like, a bias test or they might have to rate themselves on a racism scale or something similar. We don't like doing any of those things because we definitely like to educate on these topics to raise awareness, but not have anyone do self rating and definitely not rating of other people because it really causes a lot of defensiveness. It causes people to shut down. It creates a lot of just controversy in those settings. And at the end of the day, what we really need to do is just raise people's self awareness about any bias they may have and give them the skills and tools on how to help mitigate that, how to interrupt that, and how to do better so that all of us can be sort of continuously improving ourselves.

This next one is one that I think is a little bit trickier for a lot of employers, and it's no programming, training, activities, or policies that are exclusive to employees for one protect protected class that would give them preferential treatment over other employees. So the questions that we've gotten on this one are related primarily to ERGs and then to any professional development programs or sponsorship programs or special training that are is targeted at maybe high potential employees from a particular protected class that they have wanted to just sort of bolster, you know, the skill set and and leader and professional development around. Our council has been that really for any of those programs, you know, you've got to make sure that there is openness to allies, to others that are interested in providing support, others who may have some interest in being part of that program or getting some of the benefits of that program. So I'll split them into the two things. So for ERGs or affinity groups, some people call them BRGs. What that means is and we've been counseling people on this for quite some time anyway, is to not have that effort be a % sigh % siloed from the rest of the organization. So an ERG, let's say it's a women's ERG, that ERG absolutely should be open to anyone who identifies as a woman. And there should be some space and some meetings for people who identify as women to talk about some of, you know, the common challenges they have to provide each other support, provide each other coaching and mentoring, and maybe identify a couple ways to advocate for themselves in that workplace.

Additionally, that ERG should be open to others who want to help the cause, learn more about those issues, participate in some way. The ERG also should be sponsoring, you know, education for the entire organization or joining with another ERG in a philanthropy effort or sponsoring, you know, a happy hour that provides some education. So ways that it's still very integrated with the overall workforce. On the programming side or training that's looking at a specific, you know, group of employees from a protected class and trying to kind of shore up maybe some training or resources that they may not have come across up to that point in their career, you've really gotta make broaden those programs so that they're open to more people than just the ones in those protected classes. This is a very specific note in these executive orders. I do think it's one that requires a lot of particular attention. Some people have asked about how do we handle recruiting if we're trying to make sure that we are sort of casting a really wide net and being much, you know, very intentional about adding diversity to our recruiting pool. You can absolutely still do that.

You can, you know, go to a lot of different campuses. You can have all those things available on your website, you know, job postings and applications and so forth. You just can't be hyper targeted only around one particular, protected class. And then the final statute that is relevant to everyone that's in the scope of the orders is to be sure to retain lawful employment of veterans and employees who are blind. I know employees who are blind may sound like a very specific element of this statute. It it is, but it's it references a a previous order that was put into place, and they're just making sure that that continues to stand as an an addition to what was identified in the protected classes of title seven of the Civil Rights Act. So again, making sure you're still employing veterans and supporting any employees who are blind. The next piece of this is I wanna call out specifically what federal agencies and contractors must do in addition to what I've just talked about.

So there are three additional things all related to gender. One is only recognizing two sexes, male and female, and that's based on the gender that that person was born with. Related to this, to not use federal funds to promote gender ideology and to not use gender identity as a replacement for sex. So all of this is very targeted at folks who are non binary, who identify as they them, and transgender transgender employees and contractors and grant recipients. So this is very specific language. It's already being challenged in court. I do not know where this is gonna land. My personal hope is that this is shot down because gender identity is the core of everybody's identity, and we need to support and protect that and let people choose on their own how they identify in the workplace and out in the world more broadly.

That's my personal perspective. But as of now, you would be at risk if you're a federal contractor and you do have those things in place. If let's say that you, you know, you're recognizing more than two sexes and so forth, then you are gonna put your contract at risk. So this is one I think is a really good one, important one to talk to general counsel about and make sure you work through a very specific strategy and maybe do some risk mitigation and and risk planning around. You know, if if a federal contract is, like, 1% of your business, you may say, you know, I'm fine. We're gonna support our employees as we have and wanna continue to do. We can let that contract expire, not go after it again, or we'll take the risk. If it's 50% of your business, it may be that in order to stay in business, you have to do some of these things.

And, you know, I'm sure that would be an incredibly heartbreaking decision, but you've just gotta work through, you know, some of the trade offs there and and decide, you know, at least in the short term where you need to stand. The final piece here is that federal agencies and anyone dependent on federal funds also must designate intimate spaces be designated for girls, women, or females, similarly for men, boys, or males by sex and not gender identity. So this is taking it one step further and basically trying to eliminate transgender folks from using the bathroom that they of what they have of of the gender identity they've transitioned to and to get rid of any kind of safe space for transgender employees to use facilities or have, you know, an intimate space designated just for them, which is, again, completely heartbreaking. So that's another one. Again, if you're dependent on those federal funds, you're gonna need to really sit down and work through, you know, what's the risk to our business versus the risk to our employees and and where are we gonna draw the line here. So last piece I'll cover is just timing and ongoing direction. These orders have a variety of timetables. Some of them in, like, the sixty to ninety day time frame.

I think one of them went a little bit longer into a hundred and twenty days, and those were all for the heads of different agencies to come back with a more detailed plan of how they're gonna put these orders in place. So, obviously, a lot more to come there. We're only about thirty days into these orders having been issued, so we'll need to see, you know, what more specific direction comes back. Anything that's in court, I think, probably is on pause and won't pick back up until courts made some kind of decision. We'll have to see other courts interpret what stands, what doesn't, etcetera. There are websites out there that you can go to and track the status of different lawsuits related to the executive orders. There's a clearing house, I think, through the University of Michigan that is tracking. I think there are several others that are doing that as well.

I know the ACLU is active in tracking at least the cases they're filing against. So be sure and, you know, again, go out and do an updated search on that if you're curious about where these things stand as of today. And, again, talk with your general counsel or your outside counsel and make sure you're getting good legal advice and support on this. Finally, just final reminder, we've done a a detailed breakdown of every clause in each of the orders that impact DEI in the workplace. We have a very detailed document that says, you know, I'm let's say, I'm a foundation. Which of these things apply to me versus I'm in higher education versus I'm a corporate entity? Makes it really easy to kind of, you know, track where you need to be concerned and where you don't. So feel free to visit our website and and link to that. And if you have any questions, of course, please reach out.

We're available anytime. We can help you assess your risk and figure out, the best path forward, for your organization to still stay committed to the work and and do the work. DEI in total is not outlawed. It's just specific elements of it. So please stick with it. And if there's anything we can do to, you know, provide you guidance and counsel, we're very happy to do that. And that's a wrap. I'm Michelle Bogan, and that's your DEI minute for today.

Thank you.