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Since the Supreme Court overturned the use of affirmative action in college admissions last summer, it seems like corporate America has been consumed by panic over diversity and inclusion.
But last month, a diversity executive told me that it had not affected her work at all. I have to confess that I wondered if she was delusional. Had she not heard that conservative activists were threatening legal action against dozens of large companies running programmes for specific ethnic groups? Was she unaware that her colleagues in Silicon Valley were laid off by the dozen last year?
The executive, from a southern energy company, knew about it all. Yet the word she used to describe her office was “quiet.” Her mentorship programmes and cultural celebrations went on like any other year. That is the case in most human resources and diversity departments, save for a small group of high-profile companies, she insisted.
She is not the only one. While conservative lawmakers and billionaires try to undo the inclusion programmes that US corporations rolled out after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, nearly every one of the dozen executives I have interviewed recently tell me they are not altering their diversity plans.
The research group The Conference Board surveyed far more chief human resources officers than I did and found the same thing. Of the 194 executives they polled late last year, none said they planned to scale back their diversity initiatives in 2024. The likes of Bill Ackman and Elon Musk may say that such programmes discriminate against white people and men, but few executives seem to be listening.
That is not to say that the diversity discipline will escape from the current backlash unscathed. Several large Silicon Valley corporations slashed their diversity budgets last year amid recession fears, while lawsuits from conservative activists prompted Pfizer, Comcast, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America to expand programmes that were once reserved for specific racial minorities to people of all races.
Yet companies’ own demographic data shows that they are continuing to diversify their workforces even as they promote their modified programmes, according to Ken Janssens, cofounder of Windō, a platform that aggregates social responsibility data from hundreds of companies.
Disney, which became a primary target of anti-DEI campaigners for featuring minority and queer characters in its films, reported that it had increased the share of its executives that identified as people of colour from 21 per cent to 28.5 per cent over the past five years.
Nike still publishes its targets for the ethnic and gender diversity of its workforce, reporting that the representation of ethnic minorities among their US staff has steadily grown from 56 per cent to 63 per cent over the past seven years.
“It is quite bold of them, considering how much legal action is being taken against companies, so my hat’s off to them,” Janssens says. “While [other companies] might tout DEI less publicly, they will stay the course.”
Most companies seem to be far more worried about how a lack of diversity programming could make it more difficult to recruit and retain staff than getting sued, he added.
Renita Mollman, the chief administrator of Kansas City-based engineering consultancy Burns & McDonnell, says she was not feeling any pressure to alter her DEI plans. She’s too worried about the country’s shortage of engineering talent.
“We aren’t going to be the company with the most progressive, forward looking policies,” says Mollman, noting that they only organised employee resource groups, workers who join together based on shared identities or life experiences, in 2021. Such groups are a commonly accepted diversity initiative that were popular in many large companies before 2020.
“I’d say we are neck-and-neck with most of our clients, [who are] airlines, consumer product manufacturers,” Mollman added. Burns & McDonnell also sponsors science, technology, engineering and maths programmes in local high schools and partnered with historically black colleges to diversify its talent pipeline.
“People may not be jumping up and down and screaming ‘DEI’ from the rooftops,” says Heather Foust-Cummings, a researcher at workplace-focused non-profit Catalyst, “but the work continues”.
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