It’s often not the loud changes that matter most.

It’s the quiet withdrawals - the things that disappear before we’ve fully understood what they were holding in place.

For those who prefer to listen instead, the spoken version is below, or subscribe to The Aperture Field on your preferred podcast app.

I was recently part of a group of senior women leaders brought together to explore what feels like a system that hasn’t yet found its equilibrium around inclusion and diversity of thought. These were women who came with an array of battle scars matched with open hearts, aiming to make sense of what they were seeing collectively.

There were many important observations made in that session - representation of women on boards appears to be holding around 30% globally, but new placements have slowed significantly. At the same time, some women seem to be opting out of systems that don’t recognize or integrate their perspective.

After the meeting, Katrina C. Foster published a piece that stayed with me. She is naming something subtle and significant - this doesn’t look like a loud reversal, but is more like a quiet withdrawal. The language of DEI, the measurement, and the scaffolding that once made inequality visible is being slowly removed.

And I found myself sitting with a different question - the signal she is pointing to feels real, but why is this happening now, in a time where we might assume we ‘know better’?

I’ve spent decades, in different ways, pushing against systems as a woman in leadership and as someone trying to introduce new ideas into rigid structures. For a long time, I understood that experience as kind of a battle. There was always a ceiling, and my instinct was to locate the source of it - who was blocking it, who needed to be challenged and where the resistance lived. And let me tell you, I can play that role well. Give me a sword and I will go to battle without hesitation.

But over time as I ran into deeper and deeper ceilings, something began to shift. Each time I reached what I felt was the ‘final boss,’ I found an unexpected twist. The person I thought I was fighting was usually operating within constraints of their own- an incentive structure, a rule set, or pressures I hadn’t fully seen.

And when I followed that thread further, the shape of the problem itself changed. It became harder to find a singular ‘bad actor,’ and easier to see something more diffuse: systems of incentives, and structures that produce outcomes, regardless of the individuals inside of them.

That realization didn’t make the experience any easier. If anything, it made it more disorienting, because while I was trying to understand the system more deeply by listening, integrating perspectives, and questioning my own assumptions, I was still inside it. Still being shaped by it and at times, still getting hit by it.

It felt like holding a sword and shield while also extending an olive branch.

Eventually though, a different lens began to emerge. Years ago, Jeremy Rifkin, in The Empathic Civilization, wrote about how societies evolve through expanding circles of identification, and how what we consider ‘us’ grows over time: from family, to tribe, to village, to nation. At each stage, something new emerges that stretches the boundaries of the existing system and that creates friction, because integrating something new often requires changing something that already works (at least for some).

And beneath that friction is something deeper than ideology:

fear.

Not ideological disagreement or even resistance to progress, necessarily, but more of a fundamental uncertainty: if we change this system, will we still be safe within it?

History gives us examples in every direction - moments where integration created something more coherent, and also moments where it fractured what was already working.

If you look at systems over time, a pattern begins to emerge:

• An insight arises, often from lived experience, and often ahead of its time.

• A system forms around that insight, attempting to bring it into reality.

• That system becomes codified into policies, metrics, language and programs

And then slowly, it shifts. The form is still there, but the spirit begins to thin. The incentives distort, and what began as clarity becomes compliance.. What began as truth becomes language, and when that happens, legitimacy begins to erode.

It’s possible that some of what we now call DEI has followed this arc. The original signal was real, and it still is - the need to make inequality visible by naming and measuring it was necessary. But over time, many of the systems built around that signal didn’t produce the outcomes they were designed to create. In some cases, they became performative and in others, they created friction with the other parts of the system they were trying change. And when systems lose legitimacy, they are often not refined - they are abandoned.

We can see the symptoms of that now. In some places, it shows up as quiet institutional withdrawal where programs disappear, language softens and measurement declines. In other places it shows up very differently, as more heightened, even mythic interpretations of what is happening. These attempt to make sense of complexity by locating a central force, a clear antagonist (big boss), or a story that can hold the scale of the shift. When systems lose coherence, the signals don’t arrive cleanly.

There is a real risk in this moment. As Katrina points out, when we remove the scaffolding (the measurement and language), we lose the visibility. Without visibility, inequality doesn’t disappear, it just becomes harder to see and harder to act on.

But there is another risk as well. If we only focus on preserving the scaffolding without questioning whether it was sufficient to begin with, we may continue to measure a problem without meaningfully changing it. Measurement is a stage in system evolution, but it isn’t the destination.

Which brings us to a different kind of question. Not how do we we return to what we had, and not how we remove it entirely, but:

What kind of systems actually produce the outcomes we’ve been trying to measure?

Right now, we may be between systems, with the old one losing legitimacy and the new one not yet formed. That makes this a disorienting moment, but also a generative one.

When systems lose coherence, we tend to respond in two ways: we either try to preserve the structures that no longer work or we construct narratives that explain their failure. Both are understandable. Neither on their own is sufficient.

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