In January 2025, the most powerful government in the world signed an executive  order titled "Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs". Within  weeks, some of the world's most recognisable corporations viz: Walmart, Meta,  IBM, Google etc quietly began rolling back their organisational commitments.  JPMorgan swapped the term Equity for Opportunity. Kohl’s renamed its Chief DEI  Officer to Chief Inclusion and Belonging Officer. Fifty-three percent of Fortune 100  companies changed their public-facing DEI language by the end of 2025. 

The headline the world ran was: DEI is dead. 

But here is what didn't make the headline. Singapore quietly passed a Workplace  Fairness Act prohibiting discrimination based on caregiving duties, age, religion,  and disability. In Japan, 80% of employers surveyed said they would continue DEI  practices, with only 3% reviewing their approach. The European Union's Corporate  Sustainability Reporting Directive mandated diversity disclosures across member  states, irrespective of what happened in Washington. Nordic countries maintained  mandatory board gender diversity laws. And in India, DEI-related job listings rose  30% in twelve months. 

The world, it turns out, didn't get the memo. 

Because DEI was never an American invention. The spotlight of vilification was. The work was simply to build organisations where all kinds of humans can do their  best work 

That is as old as the question of dignity itself. What the political backlash actually  did was useful: it sorted the signal from the noise. It revealed which organisations  had inclusion as a visibility strategy and which ones had it interwoven into their  operating system. The ones still standing aren't doing this work despite the noise.  They are doing it because they finally know, clearly and without ambiguity, who  they are.

People: The Hyphenated Human 

For a long time, DEI operated like a filing system. There was a box for women. Another box for persons with disabilities. A box for LGBTQIA+ employees as well. A  box for age.  

And on special occasions, the teams opened each of these boxes - International Women's Day, Pride Month, the International Day of Persons with Disabilities. Every  time the right box was opened, something insightful was posted, and the box was shut again. This system was never designed for the person who doesn't fit in  a single box 

The 46-year-old queer woman navigating a hearing impairment and  perimenopause in a hybrid office designed for 28-year-old men. The  neurodivergent employee from a Tier-2 city, code-switching between his first  language and English six hours a day. The woman who survived domestic abuse  last week and is now sitting in your open-plan office, professionally composed, while her world is in pieces. 

These are hyphenated humans. These are people whose identities overlap, compound, and intersect in ways that no single-axis policy was ever equipped to  hold.

Research published in late 2025 on India-based professionals confirms what  most of us already know from lived experience. intersecting identities i.e. gender,  generation, income, education etc independently and interactively shape well being outcomes, including mental health, life satisfaction, and work engagement. 

Different cultures show different levels of this complexity. Western Europe champions gender. Latin America focuses on disability. Asia-Pacific often centres  around the culture of the organisation itself. India carries all of these simultaneously plus caste, language, religion, and geography in ways that no imported Western DEI framework has successfully accounted for. 

This is not just theoretical. When we were training consulate employees in the  heart of Mumbai, we saw professionals navigating diplomacy, protocol, and  cross-cultural decision-making daily. The most useful tools were not unidimensional diversity checklists. They were Geert Hofstede's Cultural  Dimensions framework and Erin Meyer's Culture Map: instruments that reveal how  different societies relate to hierarchy, disagreement, trust, and time.

A culture that  avoids direct confrontation is not being dishonest. A culture that values  relationship before transaction is not being inefficient. Inclusive leadership, at its deepest level, is the ability to read the room when the room contains the whole world and not mistake difference for deficiency. 

Cultures: From Intent to Architecture 

If the first failure of inclusion was being unidimensional, the second was mistaking  intent for infrastructure. 

Organisations spend years writing values statements, hosting panel discussions,  and commissioning awareness sessions. And while awareness is not nothing, it is  also not a ramp. It is not a sign-language interpreter. It is not a flexible  attendance policy. It is not a gender-neutral bathroom. Awareness does not  change architecture. 

What does? Accountability systems built with the people they are meant to serve. 

DI-verse (India's first workplace disability inclusion certification), developed by the  American India Foundation is recognised by the Ministry of Social Justice and  Empowerment and provides a case study in what genuine intent to solution  journey looks like. Built with inputs from 40+ disability rights experts and self advocates across the country, the certification evaluates organisations across six  rigorous pillars: leadership and policy, workforce representation, talent  development, workplace accessibility and adjustments, inclusive hiring, and the  lived experience of employees with disabilities. 

I was one of those forty voices. And what struck me most was not the framework, it was the fact that for the first time, the people the system was meant to serve  were the ones building it. 

I remember sharing an input at one of those sessions and then just pausing to  notice a table mapping inclusion concepts against tangible organisational  readiness. Across from me sat a lady who is a Padma Shri awardee, a doctor with a disability, navigating the room with the quiet authority of someone who has spent a lifetime making systems listen. Beside her, the architect of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act 2016 spoke in Hindi about the very law that gave millions of Indians a legal vocabulary for dignity.

That moment told me everything I needed to know about what it means to build something right: you don't design  for people. You design with them. 

The results speak for themselves.in 2025, Future Generali India earned an AA-level  DI-verse certification with 1% of their workforce comprising Persons with  Disabilities, and 22% of those hires being women, directly addressing the  intersectionality most frameworks cannot factor. Randstad India embedded inclusion into hiring playbooks and leadership development modules, earning Level A. The certifications were awarded at PurpleFest 2025 at Rashtrapati Bhavan. Not a boardroom, but a national stage. 

The business logic is equally unambiguous. Companies that actively employ Persons with Disabilities generate 1.6x more revenue, 2.6x net income, and 2x the  profit of those that do not. Companies in the top quartile for gender diversity are 25% more likely to achieve above-average profitability. Companies with above average diversity on their management teams produce 19% higher innovation  revenue. Inclusion is not charity. It is competitive infrastructure. 

Well-Being: The Reasonable Accommodation Revolution 

There is a legal concept that does not get enough airtime in inclusion  conversations: reasonable accommodation. At its core, it is a simple idea that an  organisation has an obligation to make adjustments so that a person is not  systemically disadvantaged by virtue of who they are. It is not preferential  treatment. It is the levelling of an uneven floor. Its about meeting people as they  are where they are. 

Nowhere is this more urgently needed than in the spaces where inclusion has been the least comfortable to talk about.  

Menopause affects every woman who works long enough. The average Indian woman reaches menopause at 46.6 years while still fully in the workforce, often at  the peak of her professional life. Forty-nine percent of Indian women aged 45 to 54 are in the labour force. Yet India has no national menopause workplace policy, while the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission now mandates reasonable  adjustments for menopausal employees as a recognised disability right.

WeWork India, in January 2026, introduced paid Women's Wellness Leave with one day per month for menstrual, perimenopause, and menopause needs, explicitly extending  coverage to transgender women and non-binary individuals. This is not a woke  gesture. It is a reasonable accommodation and it signals that inclusive culture  means including the whole being of our employees and peers, not just the  professional persona. 

Domestic abuse does not leave its mark at the office door. HUL created India Inc's first domestic abuse employee support policy and it was gender-neutral,  providing 10 days of paid leave. These included 15 days of lodging reimbursement,  access to psychological counselling, and the option to temporarily relocate to  another city office. In doing so, HUL acknowledged something most organisations  still resist: well-being does not clock out. An employee who is safe at work but not safe at home is not a well employee. Inclusion that stops at the building entrance is inclusion in name only. 

The Organisations That Remain 

Commitment, I have learned, does not scale with headcount. The most wholehearted inclusion work I have witnessed on the ground came from a 70- person PR agency, the one that didn't wait for a policy mandate or a certification deadline, but simply decided that championing its people was non-negotiable and built interventions accordingly, with the consistency of an organisation ten times its size. 

And then there is the work that has quietly shaped my understanding of what safe  space actually demands. For four years, as inclusivity partners at Lollapalooza  India, our role was not to put up a rainbow flag and call it done. It was consent  education. Mental health support. Sexual assault prevention. Crisis de-escalation.  Safe space creation. And real-time coordination with security, medical, legal, and  crisis response teams when things went wrong .Because sometimes they do, and  inclusion has to be operational, not ornamental. We have facilitated 400,000 people over four years there and maybe equal number of NH7 before. Every single  one of them deserving a space that was as safe as it was entertaining 

The organisations still standing are the ones who understood that this work lives under three unglamorous, non-negotiable headers: People, Culture, and Well Being.

They designed for the hyphenated human. They built certification systems  with self-advocates in the room. They wrote menopause and domestic abuse into their HR policies because the data, the law, and basic human decency left them no reasonable excuse not to. 

In India, DEI-related roles are projected to grow at 25% annually. Indian companies are doubling down not because they are immune to global politics,  but because they are solving a real problem: a talent problem, a retention problem, a productivity problem, and a dignity problem. The work here is not  imported ideology. It is a response to the reality of who is in, and who has been  left out of, the Indian workplace. The onus of inclusion always being on the ones  inside the system and seated on the tables.  

The political noise did one genuinely useful thing: it made visible the difference between organisations that had inclusion in their communications, and those  that had it in their culture. The ones who remain are not doing the work despite the climate. They are doing it because they finally know clearly, without  performance, without apology that this is who they are.

Diverse people. Inclusive cultures. Equitable well-being. Call it what you want. 

The work has a name and I remain focused on the outcomes rather than the nomenclature. 

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