The past few years have brought radical changes to the employment landscape, and among them is last year’s U.S. Supreme Court decision holding that race-conscious college admission policies violate the Constitution.

During a June 24 presentation at the Society for Human Resource Management’s annual conference in Chicago, attorneys Victoria Lipnic, Jonathan Segal and Rae Vann discussed what the ruling portends for employers.

“I know those of you in HR know this: Diversity is happening faster than what was expected,” Lipnic, a partner at Resolution Economics and former acting chair of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, told the audience.

Based on the 2020 census, roughly 4 out of 10 Americans identify as non-White, according to presentation handouts. This is a significant change from the 1980 census, where 80% of the U.S. population identified as White.

The workforce, reflecting the shift, is changing, too, along with the applicant pool, Lipnic pointed out. Younger workers are more diverse, as is the younger population generally. At the same time, the overall workforce population is aging, she noted.

Against this backdrop, “there is a strong, documented case for diversity, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively,” Lipnic said. For example, “companies that have diverse C-suite representation do better business-wise,” but there’s also increasing pressure on executives to account for their practices, she added.

Yet, in seeming tension with the business need for diversity and the country’s shifting demographics is the litigation spawned by the high court’s ruling in the college admissions case, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, the SHRM panel observed.

The decision “effectively prohibited the use of race as a ‘plus’ factor in student admissions by both private and public academic institutions,” Segal, a partner with Duane Morris, wrote last year in an op-ed to HR Dive.

The ruling doesn’t change the law with respect to workplace DEI practices because it’s generally been unlawful “for employers to consider race, gender, or another Title VII characteristic as a ‘plus’ factor even where the goal is to increase diversity,” Segal wrote.

But the case “has influenced aspects of race-conscious initiatives and created a backlash against DEI&A objectives,” Vann, head of labor and employment for Wayfair and past general counsel to the Center for Workplace Compliance, formerly the Equal Employment Advisory Council, said during the presentation.

This points to a “delicate and uncomfortable environment,” Vann added.

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