The inclusion function as a wellbeing problem. Recent research by d&i leaders and FAIRER found that 54% of DEI professionals report that their wellbeing has decreased or significantly decreased in the last 12 months.
This statistic should be a long overdue wake-up call for organisations.
In an already fast-paced and high-pressure working environment, DEI professionals are experiencing a unique and growing set of emotional, cognitive, and professional strains. While workplace wellbeing is a concern across roles, DEI roles sit at the intersection of organisational change, identity, politics, and culture, making them particularly vulnerable to burnout, stress, and disengagement.
Poor wellbeing is not only a human issue but a business one. According to the Reward & Employee Benefits Association (REBA), poor employee wellbeing poses a direct risk to business growth, with untreated depression linked to a 35% reduction in productivity. When DEI professionals are overwhelmed or pushed out, organisations lose critical capability, trust, and momentum in building inclusive cultures.
Modern workplaces are defined by constant connectivity, rising expectations, and blurred boundaries between professional and personal life. For DEI professionals, these pressures are intensified by the emotive, politicised, and highly visible nature of the work.
While many business roles are framed as technical or operational, DEI work is frequently treated as personal, ideological, or optional. This distinction creates additional strain, particularly when DEI practitioners are required to justify the existence of their own role, defend their credibility, or absorb hostility that other functions are shielded from.
The concept of emotional tax helps explain why wellbeing is deteriorating so sharply among DEI professionals. Key contributors to emotional tax include:
Being attacked or undermined, both internally and externally, creating sustained stress and hypervigilance
Public discourse around “cancelling DEI”, including media narratives that frame DEI as expendable or illegitimate
Job insecurity, as organisations scale back DEI roles in response to political pressure or economic uncertainty
The need to constantly justify the value of DEI, adding professional stress that few other roles experience
For DEI professionals from underrepresented backgrounds, this tax is compounded. Many DEI practitioners are also from minoritised groups. This creates a secondary burden, where individuals are perceived as doing DEI work because of who they are, rather than because of their expertise. Common experiences include:
Burden of representation: “You’re only advocating for this because you’re Black / LGBTQ+ / disabled”
Tokenism: Being positioned as the sole or symbolic representative of an entire community
Advocacy-based covering: Constantly monitoring tone, language, and emotion to remain “palatable”
Bias against DEI professionals, where neutrality, competence, or objectivity are questioned
This emotional labour is carried continuously.
In addition to emotional strain, DEI professionals experience an outsized cognitive load. Unlike many business topics, DEI conversations are deeply emotive rather than purely technical. Many DEI professionals are tasked with ‘changing hearts and minds’ in a time of extreme political division, on topics tied to identity, fairness, morality, whilst also being expected to deliver with strategic and technical rigour.
This means the work carries an emotional strain, requires constant emotional intelligence, diplomacy, and interpersonal collaboration. Conversations are rarely neutral, but are shaped by personal belief systems, defensiveness, unresolved tensions, making even routine DEI discussions mentally demanding. DEI professionals need to walk the line between managing the emotional intensity of topics, whilst also making it clear DEI is a business priority and not a purely emotional, fluffy ‘nice to have’.
DEI work is also frequently narrowed or distorted into simplistic or adversarial narratives. Complex issues around equity, culture and systemic barriers are reduced into binary debates, oversimplified slogans, or false dichotomies. Practitioners are forced to spend energy correcting misconceptions, adding nuance, and reintroducing complexity to conversations that have already been flattened by misunderstanding.
At the same time, DEI conversations are frequently hijacked by broader culture wars and political discourse. External media narratives, online debates, and ideological talking points often seep into workplace conversations, meaning practitioners are not simply discussing organisational culture, but navigating wider societal tensions projected into the workplace.
What was once mainstream organisational practice has increasingly been reframed as radical or extreme. As DEI has become politicised, professionals in this space are required to:
Anticipate resistance before it arises
Manage defensiveness in real time
Translate lived experience into “business-safe” language
Educate while being scrutinised
This sustained mental effort can lead to a state of constant vigilance, leaving little room for recovery.
Why resistance feels so intense
DEI resistance is often framed as rational or business-driven, but much of it is rooted in fear and perceived loss, not evidence.
Questions worth asking:
What is really driving the backlash?
Why does fairness feel threatening?
Why are DEI roles judged differently from other strategic functions?
Psychological concepts such as own-group bias and the positive contact hypothesis help explain this dynamic. Research consistently shows that meaningful contact with people who are different reduces prejudice. Yet, when organisations retreat from DEI, communities fragment, and DEI professionals are left supporting one another in isolation. As a result, many DEI practitioners are “reaching in” to their own communities for solace, when what is needed is for organisations to reach out with genuine support.
Sometimes, we find the opposite, with some professionals taking a ‘divide and conquer’ approach, positioning themselves as the ‘worthy DEI professionals’ and others as the contributors to a wider problem. Respectability politics and identity distancing are not a new phenomenon and is an understandable response to sustained pressure.
Neither of these approaches are healthy. One risks deepening isolation and existing in an ‘echo chamber’, the other reinforces divisive narratives and undermines solidarity. Together, they reflect a profession under strain.
The solution? Organisations must create spaces for DEI professionals to access support beyond their immediate peer group, reducing isolation. Cross-functional allyship and shared ownership of DEI can help ensure practitioners are being supported without being siloed.
Core problem statements
From this analysis, three clear problems emerge:
DEI professionals are absorbing disproportionate emotional and cognitive labour without adequate protection or support.
The politicisation of DEI has increased hostility, scrutiny, and job insecurity, directly harming wellbeing.
Organisations rely on DEI practitioners to drive cultural change while failing to act as allies to them.
If you manage or work with DEI professionals: be an ally
Allyship must extend to DEI professionals themselves, not just the initiatives they lead. Too often, organisations champion inclusion in principle whilst failing to support people who are tasked with delivering it. Supporting DEI professionals is more than just verbal endorsement, like all forms of allyship: it’s an action.
Practical ways to support include:
Challenging bias and misinformation about DEI roles. Do not leave DEI professionals to repeatedly defend the legitimacy, value, or strategic importance of their own function. Justifying the existence of a role should never be in the job description of the role itself.
Sharing responsibility for DEI outcomes, rather than isolating it to one function. Inclusive cultures are built collectively, and accountability and progress must sit across leadership, management and the wider organisation.
Protecting DEI colleagues from unnecessary exposure to hostility. Not every challenge, complaint or contentious conversation should be absorbed by the DEI function. Where possible, organisations should buffer practitioners from avoidable hostility and ensure difficult conversations are shared rather than siloed.
Validating DEI as skilled, strategic work. DEI work is a professional discipline requiring expertise, not just passion or advocacy.
Ensuring psychological safety, resourcing, and visible senior sponsorship. DEI professionals require the same structural support expected in any high-pressure strategic role, including senior sponsorship, realistic workloads clear mandate, and environments where they can raise concerns without repercussion.
DEI professionals are not immune to the same wellbeing challenges faced by underrepresented employees more broadly – they are often more exposed to them.
There is a strong business and moral case for organisations to:
Invest in sustainable DEI structures
Address emotional tax and cognitive load explicitly
Create cultures where DEI professionals are supported
When DEI practitioners are well, they are better equipped to build the inclusive, high-performing workplaces organisations say they want.
For more information on managing wellbeing in the workplace, explore our new programme, Driving Business Performance through Inclusion and Wellbeing, a new evidence-based programme that focuses on the root causes of workplace ill health as well as a science-based framework for creating a wellness culture.