A Jungian reading of DEI and gender-identity policy in practice: how hubris, persona and shadow surface when ideals meet law, safeguarding and operations. Traces corporate recalibration and the marketisation of higher education, the loss of critical thinkers, and offers evidence-based, law-aligned steps for durable inclusion.
What happens when ideas that seem luminous in a seminar room must live among timetables, budgets, and people? The recent conversation between Graham Linehan and Tanya de Grunwald offers a useful lens on this question. Not because it supplies easy answers, but because it shows how policies grounded in admirable intentions can stumble once they meet the contingencies of workplaces and the constraints of law. From a Jungian vantage point, this movement from promise to complication looks less like a simple policy failure and more like a mythic pattern: hubris meeting limit, glamour giving way to cloth, a spell loosening when reality speaks back.
The image that comes most readily is Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” A court assembles around an exquisite garment that cannot be questioned without risking one’s status. Social proof does the rest. In many organisations from 2018 onwards, language about gender identity and Diversity, Equality and Inclusivity took on a similar numinous quality. The intention to widen opportunity was genuine. Yet slogans such as “bring your whole self to work” entered policy before boundaries and trade-offs were thought through. Is it possible that performative inclusion displaced operational inclusion, and that the persona of progress drowned out the more ordinary work of judgement, safeguarding, and fairness?
De Grunwald’s account is pragmatic rather than conspiratorial. Large employers were trying to solve real problems: narrow pipelines, stale culture, inequity in access and progression. Many embraced third-party programmes and training because they promised speed and moral clarity. But what happens when clarity is purchased at the cost of nuance? What happens when an organisation treats a contested set of ideas as settled doctrine, and then discourages those whose day-to-day responsibilities expose contradictions or risks? The conversation notes that experienced staff—often mid-career women with strong operational instincts—either fell silent or left. This is not a marginal detail. In Jungian terms, it marks a repression of “shadow” content: the uncomfortable information that systems must integrate if they are to remain whole.
Hubris is not only pride; in Greek drama, it is a refusal of proportion. The Icarus motif adds texture here. Institutions, emboldened by a new moral altitude, flew closer to a sun of symbolic gestures and charismatic advocacy. At that height, dissent looked small, even disloyal. Yet wax melts. By 2024–25, case law, public sentiment, and ordinary workplace friction began to impose limits that the earlier ascent had not anticipated. We can see a symbolic retreat—less emphatic signalling in brand assets, tighter gatekeeping around who speaks for the organisation—arriving before a corresponding depth of policy revision. Is this a bad-faith manoeuvre, or the first step in a necessary recalibration? Perhaps the more productive question is simpler: what would it look like to anchor inclusion in legal clarity, due process, and the modest virtues of craft rather than charisma?
A Jungian reading does not accuse; it inquires. The psyche of an organisation, like that of a person, becomes brittle when it idealises one pole of experience and banishes its opposite. If an institution identifies with a compassionate persona, it may project coldness, cruelty, or caution onto internal critics, who then carry the shadow for the group. Over time, the system loses precisely the function it needs to stay related to reality: discriminating thought. Does this help explain why capable, risk-literate staff reported feeling they could not raise concerns without reputational hazard? If so, it is not only a cultural loss but a strategic one because it removes early-warning sensors from the body of the organisation.
There is a wider context. Over two decades, education and research in the UK have been drawn further into market logics. Professionalisation has brought many gains—clearer quality assurances, stronger student services, and better governance. Yet, marketisation also re-describes learning as a product and the learner as a consumer. When this “service” model dominates, the sacred centre of education—the slow, exacting work of character and judgement—can be displaced by the faster currency of status and identity. One consequence is that moral language becomes instrumental: another competitive signal, another item on a dashboard. Might that be why some universities appeared more comfortable displaying virtue than holding the tension of disagreement? And if so, what becomes of a culture that values safety from offence more than strength in discourse?
The conversation between Graham and Tanya also hints at an institutional psychology familiar to anyone who has worked inside large systems. Highly committed individuals—sometimes with significant personal investment—become the carriers of a cause. Their energy moves mountains at first. Later, the same energy can make recalibration difficult because critique is experienced as betrayal. From a Jungian angle, this is a classic “puer–senex” conflict: youthful visionary drive (puer) over-riding the sober, boundary-setting function (senex). The goal is not to suppress one pole with the other, but to bring them into dialogue: vision tested by prudence, compassion paired with duty of care.
What might a constructive path forward look like?
One place to start is with language. Words such as “inclusion” and “allyship” do real work, but only when they are specified. Organisations can ask: when we say inclusion, what are we including, and what lawful boundaries remain essential for fairness and safety? How will we articulate those boundaries without shame or evasion? How will we explain to staff that disagreements about contested beliefs are normal in liberal institutions, and that behavioural standards—not ideological assent—are the basis for belonging?
A second step is structural. Create a recurring, protected forum in which empirical effects are reviewed before and after policy adoption. Not a stage for ritual assent, but a workshop that invites legal, operational, and human-factors scrutiny. Rotate responsibility for a devil’s-advocate function so that “shadow” can speak without penalty. Track unintended consequences with the same seriousness as intended benefits. If the review process shows that a cherished initiative creates legal exposure or harms cohesion, leadership has to be willing to pivot without theatrics or humiliation.
A third step is cultural and therefore slower. Re-centre character alongside identity. This is not code for exclusion. It is an invitation to rehabilitate the virtues that make inclusion durable: courage to name problems early, patience to test solutions, fairness in applying standards, humility when things go wrong. Hiring and development can signal this shift by rewarding candour, craftsmanship, and care for the shared enterprise. If truth-telling is a path to advancement rather than a reputational risk, groupthink loses oxygen.
In universities, the work is both similar and distinct. One can honour the gains of professionalisation while acknowledging how managerial metrics have crowded out the older telos of Bildung—formation, not just information. What would it mean to treat the classroom and the research seminar as sacred spaces again, where encountering difficulty is part of the contract? Could codes of practice evolve to protect robust inquiry as carefully as they protect dignity, making clear that these are not enemies but partners in the educational task?
Finally, an archetypal note on leadership. The Trickster is never far from institutional life. He brings creativity and disruption, but also seduction and misdirection. Wise leaders do not banish him; they build containers that transform his energy into experiment rather than orthodoxy. In practical terms, this means piloting before scaling, testing claims against outcomes, and refusing to moralise uncertainty. It also means listening carefully for the Cassandra voices—those who carry uncomfortable foresight—before their resignation letters become the data.
None of this is a call to abandon the ethical impulse that first animated many DEI efforts. It is a call to ground that impulse in reality: law, evidence, and the lived experience of staff and students. Jung would describe this as individuation at the organisational level, a movement from one-sided identification to a more integrated whole. Eros belongs—care, welcome, compassion. Logos belongs—clarity, boundaries, procedure. Mythos belongs—the stories we tell about why we educate, what work is for, and how communities flourish. When these speak to one another, policies stop behaving like costumes and start behaving like clothing.
The child in Andersen’s tale asks the restoring question: “But he hasn’t got anything on.” Our version might be plainer: do these policies do what they claim under the law, in the workplace, and over time? If the answer is “sometimes,” then the task is not shame or triumphalism but craft. Mend what tears. Retire what fails. Keep what warms. And remember that institutions, like people, grow when they can hold tension without disintegrating—when they can be both compassionate and coherent, both open and exacting, both visionary and accountable.