Fair isn’t New, Just Necessary: Reflecting on Lily Zheng’s FAIR Framework

Editor’s Note:

This op-ed also appears on High Tides' website with shared copyright between the authors, Marie Deveaux and Sertrice Shipley. You can read that version here.

DEI consultant Lily Zheng introduced the FAIR framework earlier this year in an HBR piece titled “What Comes After DEI”. After it was announced, people had many thoughts around the purpose:

• Did they create this framework as a response to the Trump administration?

• By calling this FAIR, are they saying previous DEI efforts were not fair?

• Is this a replacement for the “DEI” acronym?

In our perspective, FAIR, which stands for fair, access, inclusion, and representation, is not a rebrand, but rather a core competency rubric to measure quality DEI work against; a quality assurance measurement if you will. It needn’t come after DEI, but rather, the elements Zheng articulates are the qualities of the most promising DEI practices.

When “fairness” and empathy are being weaponized to discredit diversity work, it's a pretty declarative statement to make FAIR the name of your framework. But what Zheng is doing is not pandering to the backlash, but rather challenging the field to return to rigorous efficacy; data over intentions, systems over anecdotes and gains that scale. 

Zheng’s FAIR isn’t a guide for actions, but rather a reminder of the outcomes DEI should create.

Those outcomes are grounded in the time-tested values that have catalyzed equity movements for generations. In order to see that clearly, we have to take a look at historical context–the backlash of Reconstruction, the violence that followed civil rights gains, and the policy choices that rebranded discrimination up to our present moment.

New Name, Who Dis?

DEI, the acronym that stands for diversity, equity and inclusion, is not a new concept. And the Trump era is not the first time these ideals have been weaponized, violently opposed, and widely banned, suppressed, or erased. 

Since the end of the Civil War, there has been a persistent movement to restore civil rights and liberties to those Americans who were robbed of those opportunities during and since the inception of the United States’ chattel slavery system. The idea of restoring dignity to those who have been denied systematically by the U.S. caste system is a tale as old as the country itself. And this is not the first time the language and policy of restoration have been weaponized by its opponents.

Reconstruction

In 1865, the Freedmen's Bureau was created to assist formerly enslaved people as well as Southern white refugees during the post-Civil War South to secure food, shelter, medical care, education, and legal assistance. It was established to protect freedmen and women from intimidation and assault.  And the Bureau was in good company with the expansion of Civil Rights as the Thirteenth (1865), Fourteenth (1868,) and Fifteenth (1870) amendments were all ratified during this era, abolishing slavery, defining citizenship and equal protection under the law and prohibiting denying the right to vote. These Amendments became known as the Reconstruction Amendments. And opposition was fierce then as well; The Freedmen’s Bureau was disbanded by Andrew Johnson in 1872 as he asserted it was an infringement on states' rights and gave “preferential treatment” to certain people (sound familiar?). The effort was defunded after a couple of years.

Civil Rights

During the 1960s, as Jim Crow circumnavigated the enforcement of the Reconstruction Amendments, the American Civil Rights movement saw more citizens begin to petition for organizational frameworks that explicitly supported the fair treatment and full participation of all people in civic spaces (housing, education, politics, employment). The attention to the causes for social justice and especially a heightened level of attention to racial violence during the time was brought to a head when Emmett Till, a 14-year-old black boy, was lynched in Mississippi. Emmett Till’s murder became a powerful alarm to the resounding violent oppression that American Black people faced post-Civil War. Reconstruction policies were rebranded as Civil Rights.

It was these ideals that led us to the Equal Pay Act (1963), the Civil Rights Act (1964), and the creation of the Equal Employment Commission under Title VII (1964), as well as the Age Discrimination and Employment Act (1967). 

The slowdown in the Civil Rights movement can be demarcated by Ronald Reagan's presidency in the '80s, which saw an increase in corporate deregulation at the expense of workers’ rights. We also saw targeted disenfranchisement through the War on Drugs.

DEI

Of course, in more recent history, it was the murder of another Black man, George Floyd, that once again reinvigorated public discourse about civil rights and discrimination in all facets of public life. By this time, the work was often referred to as diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI, with over 90% of S&P 500 companies mentioning DEI in their annual financial filing reports 

Whether you call it Reconstruction, Civil Rights or DEI, conceptually these ideas all point to a push to change policy so that all people regardless of their race or former access to land ownership, could fully participate in the benefits of American citizenship and the rights therein. 

It has always been public discourse and discontent that leads to policy change and a reexamination of how our laws protect our democracy and its citizens’ full participation in it.

The End of Slavery led to Reconstruction

Jim Crow led to the Civil Rights Movement

Mass Incarceration and the War on Drugs (the New Jim Crow) led to DEI

Old Wine, New Bottle

Zheng’s model has four key principles: 1) Outcomes over Intentions 2) Systemic over Individual 3) Coalition over cliques 4) Win-Win over Zero-Sum. While Zheng’s FAIR framework is a new acronym, the core principles they use to guide the framework are tried and true practices that civil rights and change management leaders have been using for decades. Let’s take a closer look at each concept. 

Zheng Principle 1) Outcomes over Intentions = Metrics Driven Approach

Zheng’s FAIR framework beckons people to consider access as a way to engage with feedback and make sure that user input is part of an ongoing development cycle. By engaging in a continuous and accessible feedback loop and prioritizing accessibility, practitioners engage with a more robust data set to inform programming and meet user needs.  And of course feedback is nothing more than data!

The concept of taking a data-driven approach to build equitable and inclusive environments isn’t new. As with any organizational initiative, from marketing to sales to R&D, it is critical to measure outcomes to know if your efforts have been successful or if you need to pivot. 

When an organization is beginning their DEI efforts, it is crucial to start with a baseline assessment to understand where you are starting from. This can include an organizational equity assessment of your policies, practices, and procedures. It can also include collecting employee voice data through qualitative and quantitative methods to understand how your employees are currently experiencing your culture. From there, you should measure change over time after you implement different efforts to see if they are having the impact you hypothesized. A robust and persistent relationship with your data and its results is how change continues to improve and permeate the system.

If you want to know if DEI is working, you have to look at the data. If you haven’t been collecting data, then you need to start collecting data. And if you don't know how to collect data, hire someone who is an expert in . . . collecting and analyzing data.

Zheng Principle 2) Systemic over Individual = Systems Change

Zheng encourages organizations to move past focusing on simply changing one person’s behavior at a time, to prioritizing large-scale systemic change. Systemic progress occurs when policies, practices, and procedures are reviewed and updated to become more “fair and human-centered”. 

Seemingly, the urgency that was sparked with the death of George Floyd led to a lot of superficial promises that yielded poorly scaled results, if at all. People were desperate to do something. And many did. Many individuals took unconscious bias training or read Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, or argued with relatives online. But those individual efforts, while an exercise in self awareness, do nothing to transform systems. That’s not DEI’s fault. That's just poor application of systems level change.

Research has shown that the way to have the most impact on culture is to create systemic equity level change within all internal and external processes. Like other change management processes, it takes time to create systemic level change. If an organization engaged in any systemic overhaul, many started and stopped at pay equity. Pay equity is important, but true equity is reflected throughout an organization from selection and recruitment to promotions and turnovers to bereavement policies and dress codes. And that’s just in the workplace. Equity must permeate the entire ecosystem. To create systemic wide change in the workplace,

1. Reflect on your organization's current policies, practices and procedures. Use tools like employee engagement surveys, pay equity audits, exit interview and promotion data and disaggregate by race, gender and other identities to surface patterns. Look for where outcomes are not equitable.

2. Consider what system changes could lead to more comparable outcomes across groups. Look for who is thriving and who is stagnant.

3. Advocate for those changes within your sphere of influence (rewriting promotion criteria, leave policies, performance appraisals, development resources)

   
   

Zheng Principle 3) Coalition over Cliques = Coalition Building

In their framework, Zheng highlights a persisting problem around how problem-solving has been approached in recent years. Oftentimes, the onus of building equitable and inclusive organizations is put on marginalized groups. Zheng champions the idea of building broad coalitions to bring people together across their differences to share accountability and collaborate on building solutions. 

Often designed as safe spaces for those who share a common identity, employee resource groups (ERGs), also known as affinity groups, became a go to action step for many eager to integrate DEI practices into workplace culture along with DEI committees and councils.

Groups like these offer opportunities to build community and celebrate shared culture and interest in equitable practices. However, it can become burdensome labor if it is expected that members of those groups become the sole advocates for the policies that would benefit their communities. What’s worse, many viewed their own identity as a barrier to membership to these coalitions if they did not identify with the central cause of the group as people disqualified themselves on the grounds of identity. (Can a white man join the Black ERG? Is it ok for civilians to hang out in the Veterans ERG? The answer to both is hell yes!)  Instead of viewing these groups as opportunities for broad based coalition work, many opted out, seeing them as exclusionary clubs or cliques, weakening the opportunity for collaborative action while simultaneously leaving the burden of change often on the shoulders of those who are most intimately and negatively impacted by the absence of it.

If you find identity politics are creating barriers to coalition work consider:

1. Showing up in solidarity for an ERG where your identity is not centered. Practice listening more than you speak and learning how others experience the workplace. Identify ways in which your struggles are interconnected.

2. Creating cross-ERG initiatives. Panels, events, and strategy sessions all support creating shared values alignment across identities and help break down the siloes that can exist when communication is not happening.

Practicing relational organizing, building relationships across race, class, gender and other identity lines to move policies forward that support more people using practices like those found in the Beautiful Trouble Toolkit.

 Zheng Principle 4) Win-Win Over Zero Sum = Win-Win

Zheng’s final principle focuses on the concept of zero-sum bias. The zero-sum bias is the belief that when one group makes progress, it is necessarily balanced by a disadvantage for another group– that no one can improve without someone else’s decline. Zheng argues that efforts tied to the FAIR framework should focus on building solutions that lead to better outcomes for all employees instead of a few.

It is a common thing for civil rights momentum to find zero-sum bias as its most virulent challenger. Zero sum bias presumes that resources are fixed. It’s what Andrew Johnson referenced in the disbanding of the Freedman’s Bureau when he mentioned “preferential treatment”. This same thinking was used in the 2023 Supreme Court cases of Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) V. President & Fellows of Harvard and Students for Fair Admissions V University of North Carolina, saying that using race as a determination of extending admissions is unfair to “other groups”. This thinking ended the Freedman’s Bureaus. This thinking ended affirmative action.

In presuming a zero sum bias, the opponents of civil rights argue that reparations to people of marginalized identities, who have been systematically denied access in the past, creates an unfair disadvantage to persons who have not been denied access.  Let that sink in. 

It presumes that reparative policies to correct for systemic oppression (slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration), put people who identify as white, male, able bodied, heterosexual and the intersections therein at a disadvantage.

In practice, when a disadvantage for one group is corrected, history shows us that all members of society benefit. A key example of this is wheelchair ramps. Ramps are primarily designed for those with mobility impairments, but they also create easier access for parents with strollers, the elderly, folks carrying or moving heavy items. The accommodation was built with the intention to remove one barrier for one group, but once a barrier is removed, it creates access for everyone’s benefit. The same can be said for race based affirmative action in higher ed, which was designed to diversify student bodies racially, and increased opportunities for first generation college students, white women and students from rural areas. When we increase accessibility for one, we increase it for all. 

For resources on how to shift your mindset from scarcity/zero-sum thinking to always creating win-win practices, consider tools like the Liberatory Design deck or exploring emergent strategy frameworks that help to root culture building in adaptability, abundance and collaboration, always. Ask yourself questions like:

• If we design this for the most marginalized, how does it improve the experience for everyone else?

• Are we treating inclusion as a resource to protect or a value to expand?

• Who else could benefit from us doing this differently?

Conclusion: A Call to Recommit with Rigor

It’s no secret that perceptions of DEI are evolving. This moment invites both practitioners and organizations to pause, reflect, and return to the fundamentals—building thoughtful, strategic programs instead of chasing buzzwords.

Zheng’s FAIR framework may not introduce radically new ideas, but it reinforces what effective DEI has always required: clarity, accountability, and a systems-level approach.

FAIR doesn’t replace DEI—it offers a practical rubric to evaluate its impact and move the work from intention to action.  And while the word “fair” has been used as coded language by the opponents of civil rights and DEI to indicate that reparation is unfair to those who have not been harmed, it is clear that Zheng’s intent with this new framework was to elevate the conversation and hold us all accountable to better execution as we seek to not just reform ourselves but the systems that we operate within, for the better.

As debates around terminology continue, Zheng reminds us that the heart of this work isn’t what we call it—it’s what we do. The real focus must remain on creating better outcomes for more people, over time.

We encourage organizational leaders to reflect on these five questions:

• What data do we have to measure how people are doing right now?

• How are our policies supporting all people to thrive?

• How are we holding everyone accountable to a continuous feedback loop?

• What time, labor and capital are we expending to change systems that are not giving people what they need in accordance to their lived experience?

• How will we measure our progress over time?

About the Authors

Sertrice (Grice) Shipley is the co-author of Inclusalytics: How DEI Leaders Use Data to Drive Their Work and founder of Plan to Action, a DEI and organizational development consulting firm that specializes in helping organizations use data to create more equitable and inclusive workplaces.

Marie Deveaux is an instructional designer, certified coach, and founder of High Tides Consulting, a boutique learning and development agency that helps organizations develop inclusive leadership through coaching, workshops, and facilitated cohort experiences.

Based in the Triangle region of North Carolina, Shipley and Deveaux often collaborate to support mission-driven organizations in designing and measuring culture change grounded in data, systems, and equity-centered strategy.