How DEI Must Change in 2026 to Survive – Time Magazine
This week marks one year since the Trump administration issued its first executive orders targeting corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs, and many leaders remain stuck between fending off external attacks and meeting the needs of diverse workforces.
“You still have an obligation to do right by all your workers,” says Lily Zheng, an inclusion consultant and author of a new book, Fixing Fairness. Successfully meeting those obligations requires looking past the buzzwords driving culture wars and “creating real value by solving real problems for real people.”
To help leaders do that, Zheng’s book introduces a new framework called FAIR, which stands for fairness, access, inclusion, and representation. “It’s a matter of identifying where your workplace falls short, fixing those problems, and making a better workplace for everyone,” Zheng says.
To understand how DEI efforts need to evolve in 2026 and beyond, we spoke with Zheng. Below are excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
How does your new framework, FAIR, differ from what you call ‘legacy DEI’?
Legacy DEI targets the behaviors and mindsets of individuals rather than environments. It tends to focus on cliques and small groups of employees and can be zero-sum in how it’s framed. The four tenets of FAIR are the inverse: outcomes over intentions, systems over self-help, coalitions over cliques, and win-win over zero-sum. It’s not just a communications rebrand. It’s not just that we’re [avoiding] the letters DEI and trying to replace it with FAIR. It’s that the work itself is evolving.
For example, we often use the tongue-in-cheek term ‘food, flags, and fun’ to talk about common DEI-related events: ’Oh, it’s a heritage month. Let’s wave some flags, get some food and have some fun.’ FAIR would say, ‘That’s not effective. You’re not solving any problems. You’re not changing systems.’ FAIR represents a far higher standard that has to become the minimum for this work.
That distinction leads to a different approach to the idea of representation…
Yes. For decades now, when we’ve talked about increasing representation, we think about the number of women [or] the number of people of color going up within the organization. The FAIR framework recognizes that not only have we really struggled to change those numbers, [our focus] on the identity boxes might actually be incentivizing unintended negative consequences, [such as] tokenism.
There’s no way any one leader can check everybody’s identity box at the same time. How do you represent everyone when you have limited people and positions of power? The answer is trust. We need to have leaders [who], regardless of whatever identity boxes they check, are in community with us. They understand our needs. We may not agree with them all the time, [but] they speak with a true understanding of what I care about and what I need.
Those are skills that can be developed. It’s your ability to critically think, your ability to connect with people, to process disagreement, to handle differences, to create strong relationships, to build trust. That’s a far more proactive way to treat this work than the blunt-force instrument of, ‘Do you check the same box as me?’
How do you recommend addressing disparities between groups?
The answer is targeted universalism, an idea that was developed by the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley. It says we need to recognize that we are different. We [need to] use those disparities to understand our shared environment so that we can fix [it] for everybody.
One company I worked with had a gender disparity, and it was a complicated one. Men occupied most of the positions of power, but they were also the most miserable. Women had the best [sense of wellbeing], but were way underrepresented in leadership. Rather than point fingers and say, ‘Who is to blame?’ or ‘Who is the oppressor?’ we instead asked, ‘Why is this happening?’
It turned out this company had a culture of overwork that put really unrealistic expectations on its leaders that could only be fulfilled if [they] had a stay-at-home wife. We challenged that and said, ‘What might better for everyone look like? How can we improve wellness for men? How can we improve promotion odds for women?’
[Editor’s note: In Fixing Fairness, Zheng shares some of the initiatives they piloted to change the organization’s culture of overwork, including scheduling messages, communicating a “right to disconnect,” and adapting recognition and promotion processes to reward productivity and efficiency rather than long hours. As a result, gender disparities in wellness, promotion time, and leadership positions began to close. “We had made enormous strides in resolving gender disparity but had hardly ever talked about gender,” Zheng writes.]
How do you translate that approach into designing better workplaces?
The complementary idea behind targeted universalism is the ‘curb-cut effect,’ which refers to the part of sidewalks that curve downwards. They were made as an accessibility regulation, but if you’ve ever used a bike, had a roller luggage, [or] pushed a stroller, you have inadvertently benefited from this design improvement.
It’s a really good example of targeted universalism in action. When we design for people who are marginalized, who have a worse experience in the status quo, we actually benefit all of us. That applies to so many more things besides [sidewalks]. It applies to good product design. It applies to the employee experience.
Read our 2025 Q&A with Zheng for more on the failures of legacy DEI, an approach to data to make the work more effective, and more. Then, explore our coverage on why DEI is a change management issue, measuring your DEI strategy’s effectiveness, and how to build “inclusion champions” in your organization.
Fixing Fairness is out now. Order it on Amazon or Bookshop.
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