I am speaking specifically to diversity initiatives visible to all employees, as opposed to those that are specific to managers or HR.

The law doesn't require us to banish the phrase "master/slave" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.

The law doesn't require us to banish the words "whitelist/blacklist" from our lexicon, yet it is part of our diversity initiative.

The law requires we do not discriminate based on a protected category (gender, race, etc). We have always been compliant. However, the law does not require us to hold special recruiting events for underrepresented folks when we are already compliant, but yet that is a major part of my company's diversity initiative.[1]

There are pay disparity laws. We were fully compliant before they became the law. They are not part of the diversity initiative and usually not discussed.

The law doesn't prohibit us from saying "Merry Christmas!" but our diversity initiative addresses this.

The list goes on and on.

Note: I am not saying I'm against such initiatives. Merely noting that at least for my company (and jurisdiction), these initiatives are not about what the law requires. We have always had employee expectations training for all employees, and it already covered things required by law, long before the company dove into these initiatives.

It may be that your company's diversity initiative is about legal compliance, but for many company's, it is a lot more than that (by a lot, I mean the majority of the initiative is not required by law).

> The risk of running into both PR & legal trouble

There's a world of a difference between PR trouble and legal trouble. Your comment originally was about the legal side, and so is my response. I do believe that most diversity initiatives are about PR, and not about the law, which was why I responded.

[1] These are invite-only, and so it's not open to all groups - just the ones we picked.

No. He's implying that the fact something is a law doesn't mean your employer should lecture you about it.

I think he's referring to the incident where Google decided to throw out all applications from caucasian and asian men back around the beginning of 2018. They were directed to “purge entirely any applications by non-diverse employees from the hiring pipeline". Non-diverse meaning caucasian or asian men. They had a diversity problem so they decided to "solve" it in the most racist way possible. They also had another program to assign interviewers based on race and gender to match the applicant. Rather than trying to increase their hiring pool to cover some of the implicit bias they just decided to double down on the racism.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/2/17070624/google-youtube-wi...

I should have been more clear. Like someone else mentioned, these diversity (and inclusion) discussions are not related to discrimination laws and equal opportunity. They are always related to increasing diversity in the company by hiring more underrepresented people (previously this just meant women in eng but now it's been expanded to POC). In order to achieve this, companies are actively discriminating against non-minorities, which some may call positive discrimination. Regardless, it's discrimination nonetheless and it's very common yet somehow nobody cares.