IPE@WU Theses: Imani Sophia Faber

In recent years, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies have become one of the most debated topics in U.S. politics. While some administrations have expanded funding and support for these programs, others have moved quickly to dismantle them. This contrast became especially striking when President Biden increased federal DEI funding, while former President Trump eliminated it. Given that entrepreneurship, especially small business support, has historically enjoyed bipartisan backing in the United States, this sharp shift raised an important question for me. For my master’s thesis, I therefore wanted to understand why U.S. administrations take such different approaches to DEI policies in the context of Women-Owned Small Businesses (WOSBs).

From this puzzle, I developed a central research question: why do U.S. administrations implement or dismantle DEI policy for women-owned small businesses? My interest in this topic was sparked by news coverage of DEI funding cuts, but it became more focused when I examined federal funding statistics and noticed how women entrepreneurs were positioned within these programs. Compared to other possible angles, this focus felt both underexplored and politically revealing.

To explain these policy differences, I analysed the most recent Executive Orders on DEI Policy, policy reports about women entrepreneurship, and interviews I conducted with a business owner and a head of a Black chamber of commerce. From this analysis, I concluded three possible explanations for DEI policy shifts from the women entrepreneurship perspective. The first hypothesis focused on beliefs about meritocracy, whether administrations see the U.S. economic system as fundamentally fair or structurally unequal. The second considers how different governments value women’s labor, particularly whether they prioritize unpaid or domestic work over women’s participation in the formal economy. The third looked at whether administrations seek to maintain existing racial and gender hierarchies or instead aim to dismantle them.

Using qualitative data and a grounded theory approach, I analyzed how these explanations played out across administrations. One of the biggest challenges I faced was methodological: grounded theory typically produces one central theory, not several competing ones. To address this, I developed a set of evaluation criteria that combined grounded theory principles with a critical realist approach to causation. This allowed me to assess each hypothesis systematically.

Ultimately, the most convincing explanation was the meritocracy hypothesis. It offered the strongest and most flexible framework, as it could account for both economic reasoning and social attitudes found in the data. Importantly, it also has the potential to be reapplied and tested in future research, beyond this specific case.

Beyond the academic findings, this thesis was personally challenging and rewarding. There were moments when I felt overwhelmed, doubted my research direction, or worried that the structure I had chosen was not working. What helped was accepting that there was no way back, only forward, and reminding myself that other interests could always be explored later. Learning to take breaks, to be patient with myself, and to trust the process became just as important as the research itself. Once the research and writing was completed, I also enjoyed the process of devising a way to portray my thesis creatively and without the pressure of an academic format through a popularization project published here on YouTube.

I hope my findings are useful for policymakers and practitioners who work on equality-focused policies. Rather than treating inconsistent DEI outcomes as a reason to abandon these programs altogether, my research suggests the need for reform, especially policies that engage small business owners directly and meaningfully in decision-making. For me, this project strengthened my desire to work on issues of equality in the future and helped me trust that, even in uncertainty, careful research can produce something worth reading and thinking about.

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