What: Fixing Fairness argues that legacy diversity, equity, and inclusion programmes have not merely failed; they have generated the conditions for their own political destruction. Lily Zheng proposes a replacement: the FAIR Framework, built around four outcomes everyone deserves to experience (Fairness, Access, Inclusion, and Representation) and four governing tenets (outcomes over intentions, environment over individuals, coalitions over cliques, and abundance over scarcity).

Why it is important: Published in 2026 against a backdrop of rolling DEI rollbacks and coordinated political backlash, the book reframes a poisoned ideological debate as a problem of organisational design. A YouGov poll cited in the opening pages found that only 20% of workers felt DEI programmes had personally benefited them; more than 60% reported no effect at all. Zheng's central proposition, that anti-DEI backlash is the logical consequence of this irrelevance and not a groundswell of hatred, is uncomfortable for advocates and critics in equal measure, and more persuasive for being so.
Their research and perspectives were among those most extensively quoted in the IADS White Paper DEI at a crossroads in retail.   

Book Review: Fixing Fairness