Conservative activists who have led a backlash to diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on US campuses are turning their focus to corporate America, putting pressure on business leaders at a moment when some were already backing away from such programmes.
Attacks from critics such as hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, who called DEI the “root cause” of a jump in antisemitism at universities since the Israel-Hamas war began, have sparked a public debate among executives about policies that have proliferated in businesses in recent years.
Opponents argue that measures companies have taken to support employees from various minority groups effectively discriminate against white people and men.
“DEI is just another word for racism,” X owner Elon Musk wrote on the social media site last week. “Shame on anyone who uses it.”
Conservatives have disparaged corporate diversity initiatives since their inception in the 1960s, noted Joelle Emerson, chief executive of DEI consulting firm Paradigm, but companies largely tuned out opponents as fringe voices before Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel on October 7.
Many DEI executives were more afraid of litigation from civil rights groups accusing them of doing too little to end discrimination and create diverse workforces than from campaigners such as Edward Blum, whose Supreme Court victory over Harvard and the University of North Carolina last year effectively ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Yet the anti-DEI movement’s successes in higher education have energised conservative activists to target corporations, shifting the conversation around diversity programmes from whether they are sincere enough to whether they should exist at all.
“I think what is more concerning [to me] is that moderate and progressive groups are starting to get caught up in the backlash and to question if this work actually isn’t good,” Emerson said. “And that’s what I’m seeing happen more right now.”
The backlash is part of a larger debate on cultural issues, spearheaded by Republican lawmakers, that has drawn companies such as Disney, Target and Anheuser-Busch into the headlines.
Corporate DEI initiatives such as anti-bias training and recruiting outreach strategies multiplied after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but have come under pressure as companies cut costs amid economic uncertainty.
Several large corporations cut diversity funding, and a handful, including Twitter, Meta and online property broker Redfin, laid off members of their inclusion teams last spring.
Then, in June, the Supreme Court ruled against race-conscious university admissions, prompting many companies to rethink their hiring practices amid a wave of litigation and political pressure. Republican attorneys-general from 13 states warned Fortune 100 chief executives of “serious legal consequences” for companies “treating people differently because of the colour of their skin, even for benign purposes”.
Pharmaceutical group Pfizer and law firms Morrison Foerster and Perkins Coie opened up applications to their diversity fellowships to students of all races last autumn after lawsuits accused them of racial discrimination.
Legal analysts warn that factoring a job applicant’s ethnicity into hiring decisions could be considered unconstitutional under the logic used in the university affirmative action case.
The growing pressure has left executives confused over how to respond. Paradigm’s surveys have found that many DEI initiatives remain popular among workers. None of the 194 chief resource officers The Conference Board surveyed last month said they planned to scale back their diversity efforts.
But The Conference Board also found that just 12 per cent of US chief executives saw the creation of a more inclusive culture as a priority, down from 15 per cent two years ago.
Calls from conservative groups such as Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights to overturn corporate DEI plans have continued. Conservative legal groups including former Donald Trump adviser Stephen Miller’s America First Legal and the American Civil Rights Project sent shareholder letters to at least 25 companies last year, including Starbucks and McDonald’s, arguing that their racial diversity initiatives breached their duties to investors.
Some businesses have renamed their race-oriented recruitment programmes to avoid legal scrutiny since the Supreme Court ruling while leaving the initiatives largely unchanged, said Porter Braswell, founder of 2045, a membership network for professionals of colour.
At other companies, programmes that were once advertised to black employees now appeal to “diverse individuals”, Braswell said, and policies that once aimed for “inclusion” now target “employee wellness”.
American Airlines, BlackRock and JPMorgan Chase are among the companies to have revised race-related language in their DEI policies, Reuters reported last month.
Black professionals, who have been the focus of many corporate DEI efforts since Floyd’s murder, are responding “with an eye roll”, Braswell said.
Trier Bryant, an inclusion consultant who previously worked on diversity efforts at Twitter and Goldman Sachs, painted the developments as part of a pattern where progress on diversity has been followed by backsliding or backlash. “We know there’s a pendulum that swings where there’s scrutiny [of DEI programmes], and then effort and actual prioritisation of DEI and then there’s none of that,” she said.
Proponents of corporate DEI programmes argue that businesses have commercial as well as moral reasons to help under-represented groups. Mark Cuban, the billionaire entrepreneur, wrote on X last week that people trusted businesses whose workforces look like them, and ensuring that minority employees were comfortable at work made them more productive.
“When companies do DEI well, you see a well run, successful company,” Cuban wrote.
For now, few businesses are thinking of ending their DEI programmes, said Emerson: “It’s more, ‘wow, this external conversation is making it a lot harder for us to do the work that we’re trying to do’.”
In some cases, though, companies are dealing with DEI critiques from closer to home. After Lululemon co-founder Chip Wilson criticised the athletic wear brand’s “whole diversity and inclusion thing” in a Forbes interview, the company quickly distanced itself from him.
“Chip has not been involved with the company since his resignation from the board in 2015,” its statement read. “We are a very different company today.”
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