Triggered: The Life and Death of DEI

With Lachlan McNamee and Kyle Peyton

This book offers a critical retrospective on the rise and fall of DEI. It explores why American institutions diversified some roles but not others, why efforts to reshape organizational culture proved ineffective, and why these initiatives provoked backlash. Drawing on demographic data from millions of university and corporate employees, together with original field and survey experiments, we trace how DEI emerged at the intersection of grassroots demands for social justice and the limited concessions organizations were willing to make. We show how these efforts endured—sustained by their value as safety cues for minorities—and how they served as a reputational shield against deeper reform.