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Last Monday, as the newly sworn-in President Donald Trump announced the US government would now only recognise two genders, male and female, a triumph of corporate diversity was being applauded, loudly, in Davos.
It was directed at a boss who had just told an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum about a transgender employee who had long dreamt of adopting a baby girl and buying a house for her mother.
“A couple of months ago, she messaged me and she said, ‘I’ve done both,’” said the boss, visibly pleased with the opportunities now available at a company trying to make its workforce more diverse and inclusive.
The name of this woke business warrior? Priya Agarwal Hebbar, chair of India’s Hindustan Zinc mining company and non-executive director at the Vedanta mining and energy conglomerate founded by her father, Anil Agarwal.
For avoidance of doubt, the idea of a woke mining boss makes as much sense as Trump taking up yoga.
Hebbar was by no means the only leader in Davos to make it clear the Maga vision of corporate life will be resisted by boardrooms that have found diversity and environmental measures they adopted years ago make financial sense.
“We’re not going to change course,” Uber chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said in an interview with the FT at the Alpine gathering. “We think that building an employment group that is diverse, that is global, that thinks about all aspects of the business, that’s positive, that’s just good business.”
Ralph Lauren boss Patrice Louvet said briskly: “It would be very myopic to not represent the consumers that we serve, and we serve a very broad and diverse range of consumers.”
Yet Davos also showed Trump’s war on what he later called the “absolute nonsense” of “discriminatory” DEI measures cannot be ignored. I did not hear a single chief executive at the World Economic Forum gathering using language as blunt as Trump’s. But nods to the president’s vow to make America a “merit-based country” were evident.
“We need to create an environment where people feel included and it needs to be a meritocracy where everybody has the opportunity to succeed,” Rich Lesser, global chair of the Boston Consulting Group, told one forum event.
Trump’s approach may embolden some business leaders to follow Meta, McDonald’s, Walmart and other big US corporations that have already scaled back their DEI programmes amid the Trump comeback.
And it is easy to imagine that executives itching to end work-from-home policies may be inspired to act following Trump’s day one order for federal workers to get back to their offices five days a week.
But things are more complicated when it comes to Trump’s push to make fossil fuels great again.
Wall Street banks had already pulled out of net zero alliances following Trump’s re-election, prompting speculation in Davos that the future of banking corporate sustainability departments may not be bright.
And a number of executives said privately they might now talk less about planet-saving and more about “resilience” boosting when it came to their climate work.
Yet 40 chief executives met in the Swiss ski town to advance moves in their sectors that support and protect nature. “That suggests that there is another side to the ESG backlash story,” said Jack Hurd, head of nature at the World Economic Forum.
And other leaders said years of experience had shown the financial wisdom of carbon-cutting measures.
“It’s incredibly beneficial from an economic standpoint,” Jesper Brodin, chief executive of the Ingka Group, the main Ikea retailer, told me as Davos drew to an end.
Cutting emissions from supply chains and operations had focused attention on resources and costs that in turn had helped Ingka’s revenues grow by 24 per cent since 2016, while carbon emissions had fallen by 30 per cent, he said.
Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire determined to turn his Fortescue iron ore mining group into a green industry showcase, had a similar story. Even though he is only a third of the way through his decarbonisation plans, he said the economic case for it was evident.
Companies that jumped on the anti-ESG bandwagon and said, “Let’s just go full speed ahead, bugger the icebergs,” were in for a shock, he said. “You will be like the Titanic because the climate doesn’t care about our politics, and it’s getting worse.”
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