Five years after the publication of Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, Minal Bopaiah looks back on what’s changed and what hasn’t.
Five years ago, my first book, Equity: How to Design Organizations Where Everyone Thrives, was published by Berrett-Koehler. Equity hit the bookshelves (digital and analog) in 2021, at a moment when a great many people, organizations, and institutions decided, or at least proclaimed, that fairness was worth designing for.
A lot has changed in five years. The word equity itself has become contested territory. Programs have been renamed, dismantled, or scrubbed from corporate websites. What was once announced with a press release is now, in many places, unmentioned or hidden.
However, the heart of the book has not aged. If anything, the current climate has made it easier to see how systems shape our experience. So on the occasion of the book’s fifth anniversary, it’s worth returning to what it taught and asking, honestly, “what still holds up in 2026?”
Here is what I still know to be true.
1. Equity and equality are both needed for fairness and justice
Equity is careful about a distinction that a lot of people turn into an either/or battle. Namely, equality is when everyone gets the same thing; equity is when everyone has what they need to thrive and participate fully. Equity does not fault people for being different; it makes room for difference and leverages it.
Crucially, my book never argues that equality is bad. It contends that fairness sometimes requires sameness, and sometimes it requires difference, and knowing which the situation calls for is wisdom.
In the book, I discuss how a “separate but equal” solution like civil unions for LGBTQ+ relationships instead of marriage would have tipped the scales toward second-class status for those Americans; only marriage equality, the same institution and the same legal recognition, would create a just society.
Similarly, many who rely on disability income lose benefits the moment they marry, and others pay a $497 penalty every month for choosing to build a life together. So the fight for true marriage equality for all Americans continues. But this would also require an equitable solution, i.e., continuing to provide people with disabilities the necessary financial support they need to function and thrive in a society not designed for their access or participation.
Equality gives you the principle that no one should be treated as less-than. Equity asks you to look at the design, who does this system benefit, directly or indirectly, and who does it harm? Five years later, much of the backlash against equity rests on quietly dropping that second question. Treating everyone the same, full stop, sounds clean and fair until you look at who the sameness was designed around.
Equity is the harder idea to hold: it’s about strategy and systems. Equality is intuitive. Equity asks you to think about design, and to keep thinking about it. That difficulty hasn’t gone away. Neither has the truth underneath it: you cannot get to justice with only one of these tools.
2. Systems still impact individuals
We live inside systems, policies, laws, structures, institutions, traditions, and informal rules that dictate how people operate — and those systems were designed. Not always maliciously or by anyone alive today, but designed, iteration by iteration, in ways that advantaged some people over others. Some of those design choices hold opportunity. Others hold barriers. And the system you were born into has far more to do with where you end up than most people want to admit.
The reason we don’t see these systems is because of a pervasive belief in rugged individualism: the idea that a person’s success or failure is constructed solely by their own hard work. As I explain in my book, effort matters, but effort is only one part of the picture, and rugged individualism asks you to ignore all the other parts. It can’t explain how people who exhibit real agency and real hard work may still live in poverty. According to research from the University of Chicago, more than half of people living in homeless shelters and 40% of unsheltered people were employed the year they were homeless. They had jobs. They went to work. But the system they were in, where wages have not kept pace with housing costs, where a single medical bill or car breakdown can unravel everything, made that work insufficient.
When rugged individualism becomes the whole story, it leads to polarization and isolation. We start to believe that what happens to one person or group doesn’t affect anyone else. The belief in “separate fates” makes it easy to look at another regular person and see them as “other.” And from there, to look away. Instead of turning and looking at the people designing or holding these systems in place.
Five years later, the push toward rugged individualism has only gotten larger and louder. A great deal of recent argument amounts to an insistence that if we simply stop measuring, stop naming, and reward “merit,” fairness will follow. But merit-based arguments fail to recognize that while talent might be evenly distributed, opportunities are not. Systems still shape who gets access to what, and telling individuals to try harder is not a strategy. It’s a way of avoiding looking at the design.
3. Systems hide oppression
There’s an old adage in the design industry: great design should be experienced, not seen. Most people have encountered this without knowing it has a name. Disney invented an entire color, “Go Away Green“—a grey-green shade engineered to make the eye glaze right over it—to paint fences, staff doors, and maintenance buildings. It doesn’t make things invisible. It just makes them incredibly easy to ignore.
“Great” design is exactly what makes certain forms of injustice so durable. Equity reminds us that racism and other systems of oppression operate as “invisible thumbprints on our brain,” influencing decisions we don’t even register. They were designed to be invisible and to adapt over time. Oppression that announces itself can be named and fought. Oppression that presents itself as simply “the way things are,” as neutral or normal, is the kind that outlasts attempts to dismantle it.
Equity teaches what it calls system sight: the ability to notice the design and, once you notice it, to change it. You can’t redesign what you can’t see.
Over the past two years, the infrastructure that helps people see has been actively dismantled. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting was defunded and dissolved. Over a thousand local stations that previously served as primary news sources, especially in rural communities, face closure or have already gone dark. All while a striking number of corporations have stopped publicly reporting on their equity efforts. We’ve seen a 65% drop in the number of Fortune 500 companies choosing to publicly document their inclusion practices. Schools and public institutions have pulled diversity data from websites. The pattern isn’t subtle: the tools that help people see systems—journalism, public data, transparent reporting—are being removed.
Oppression stays in place by going unseen, but now the efforts to fight it are going unseen too: less language, less measurement, less visibility. When the naming stops, when the measuring stops, when the reporting stops, accountability gets a lot harder in every direction. And what’s left looks a lot like the Go Away Green version of public life: still there, but engineered to be easy to ignore.
4. Liberation needs to be built to last and that means building it quietly
If oppression is dangerous because it’s invisible, the instinct is to make liberation loud: to put it on banners, in mission statements, on the wall. But the most durable equitable solutions are, in their own way, quiet. Not hidden from scrutiny, but hidden from friction. Built so far into the system that doing the fair thing becomes the easy, natural, almost unconscious choice.
Equity illustrates this with a story that stuck with a lot of readers. In 2009, designers in Stockholm turned a subway staircase into a working piano—each step a key that played a note when you stepped on it, It was an effort to nudge commuters to take the stairs instead of the escalator. A video of delighted commuters “playing” their way up went viral. It worked. For about two days. Then rush hour reasserted itself, and hurried commuters chose the escalator because it was quicker and more efficient.
The lesson isn’t that nudges don’t work, but that novelty doesn’t last. Novelty is wonderful for starting change and terrible for sustaining it. Equity pairs the Piano Stairs with an example from international development: the PlayPump, a device designed to bring drinking water to communities in several African countries by harnessing the energy of children playing on a merry-go-round. The concept drew major media attention and millions in funding; it sounded ingenious. But the design was created without involving African children or mothers in the process. A White advertising executive in the UK licensed the design from a South Africa-based engineer promoting an invention that required low-income children to spend their time “playing” to access drinking water. Which is weird because play, by definition, is purposeless. When mothers sent their children to school, the mothers had to push the merry-go-round themselves just to get a basic human right. After a few years and millions in funding, many PlayPumps sat idle and hand pumps were reinstalled.
Like the Piano Stairs, it had been built on novelty. Unlike the Piano Stairs, it compromised real people’s dignity in the process.
Sustained change comes with invisibility, but the right kind. A good nudge is invisible, preserves choice, and reduces the bandwidth needed to do the right thing. It’s the onboarding process that automatically opts new employees into bias training but lets them opt out. It’s the promotion structure where qualified people advance by default rather than by exception. It’s the hospital whiteboard with the patient’s name on it so every staff member addresses them as a person without being told to. The equity is designed so deep into the way things run that no one has to summon courage to participate in it. It just is how things work.
I wish more people had paid attention and built invisible solutions to injustice in the past five years. If they had, we would be seeing fewer rollbacks. Fairness that’s been built into the plumbing of an organization is far more durable, precisely because it isn’t a program you can strike from a website. It doesn’t need a banner. It doesn’t need a name. It just needs to be how things work. That’s how you build liberation that lasts.
5. We’re losing the communication game
Being right is not the same as being effective, but for years the equity conversation has confused the two.
Equity is blunt about how people actually respond to communication about systems and fairness and most of what doesn’t work comes down to skipping steps. Blanket statements like “racism is systemic” or “some groups have unearned advantages” are not wrong, but they assume a shared understanding of how the system works that most people simply don’t have. Without an understanding of the influence of systems, these facts divide rather than build. People believe or reject them on instinct rather than understanding. You have to explain the causal links, how a given design produces a given outcome, or the message will get attributed right back to individual effort. The how is crucial.
Communication is more than words. It’s about tone, values, and frames. When you frame equity as the opposite of equality, we lose because common sense tells us equality is fair in many instances. Pitting the two concepts against one another was never a good frame. The opposing frame, built almost entirely on rugged individualism and separate fates, has been winning the communication war. It’s simpler. It feels more intuitive. And it was repeated louder, more consistently, and with more discipline than the equity message ever was.
A more positive frame for equity would have been one that emphasized how, because as humans we have both similarities and differences, we need a flexible system (legal and otherwise) that is designed to accommodate those similarities and differences. We need equal access to transportation, but we need different modes of transportation based on our preferences and needs. We need equal access to education, but also education that can accommodate different learning styles. We need equal access to healthcare, but healthcare that responds to our health needs and can protect all members of a family, despite differences in gender, age, disability, lifestyle, and other circumstances, chosen or unchosen.
Frames matter more than words. Values come before arguments. And being effective, actually moving people, actually changing systems, matters more than the private satisfaction of being right. That was true five years ago. The retreat we’re watching right now is what it looks like when that lesson goes unheeded.
Five years later
None of these five truths depended on the political weather of 2021 and none of them have been debunked by the political weather of 2026. Equity and equality are still both required for justice. Systems still shape individual lives. Oppression still hides and now, in a quieter irony, so does much of the work meant to reveal it. The most lasting version of that work is still the version built quietly into how things run. And we are still losing the communication game. It’s still winnable, if the people who care about fairness are willing to trade a little of the satisfaction of being right for the harder work of being understood.
Equity’s central faith is that everything in the human-made world was designed by someone no greater than you, and that whatever was designed can be redesigned. Five years later, that’s still true, even if we do live in an even more unfair world. But the goal was never to create a finished product of a fair system; it was always to keep iterating upon the design, pushing progress forward, one millimeter at a time.
This article was written by Sage Eubanks and Minal Bopaiah with the help of claude.ai. As a small business, we thoughtfully engage artificial intelligence to improve our efficiency, while also using human experts and reviewers to ensure quality and mitigate bias.