Callum Borchers, a self-identified DEI maven, ended his Wall Street Journal article with this bit:

To restore confidence in hiring fairness, companies should make clear that business goals come first and diversity is part of a strategy to recruit top talent, she [Ruth Villalonga, who advises companies on diversity messaging as senior vice president at Burson] says.

If these wonders were serious about diversity improving their bottom lines, though, and not just engaged in cynically rephrasing their DEI sewage to better message it, they would take concrete steps in that direction.

Those concrete steps would begin with the Critical Item of no longer lying to their prospective hires and those passed over for promotion. Harvard sociologist Frank Dobbin, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University, as paraphrased by Borchers:

When a woman is promoted and a man was in the running, HR will often wink and say, “Maybe next time, guy.” Even when the woman is promoted because she’s better-qualified, it’s a way for the manager to get out of having a difficult conversation.

Here’s a carefully anonymous executive recruiter, whose level of integrity is illustrated by his cowering behind that anonymity:

[P]roviding honest feedback to unsuccessful job candidates is awkward and sometimes adversarial, so it is tempting to fudge the reason for rejection.
He offered a scenario: “How do you tell someone they had body odor or were weird? ‘Sorry, bud, DEI strikes again!'”

The answer to Anonymous One’s scenario is as straightforward as telling that person he has body odor, or is weird by the company’s standard. The truth may well be uncomfortable and awkward, but avoiding that in favor of lying both does a gross disservice to the one being rejected, denying him his opportunity understand where to improve, and it’s plain cowardly and dishonest. Who wants to work for a liar or a coward?

Those concrete steps would continue with another Critical Item: working from the ground up to help toddlers and pre-schoolers, and their parents, have actually equal opportunities at quality education so those children could develop their skills, their talents, their interests as they grow up and progress through K-12 and then trade school/community college or college and university.

Employers’ concrete steps would further include the Critical Item of pushing colleges and universities to eliminate DEI-related positions in school management and push STEM subjects in their school curricula, withholding recruiting efforts on their campuses and ignoring resumes with those schools’ degrees on them until they do.

Diversity—true, honestly built diversity—would flow out of that.