It is difficult to think about the practice of human resources today without talking about the astonishing collapse of DEI practice and influence. I cannot think of any equivalent change in modern times—with the possible exception of the rapid rise of industrial unions after the UAWs sit-down strike in Flint, Mich., in 1936, almost a century ago now.
While it’s hard to identify good evidence on how extensive DEI practices had become before 2024, it would be difficult to find an employer of any size that did not recently have some executive DEI position and associated practices. DEI as a field has its own associations, conferences and, of course, a plethora of consultants pushing it along. That is just as much, or more, the case in the public sector and especially in higher education.
Even before the Trump administration banned anything that even looked like a DEI practice from the federal government, employers were stepping back from their practices. As this was happening, consultants and other organizations continued to push DEI practices forward: There wasn’t any recalibration. Now, it is a mad rush for the exits as one company after another announces they are pulling back from DEI.
See more: Corporate DEI is under fire—putting HR right in the crosshairs
What accounts for the shift? I should acknowledge that I am not a DEI expert and have had only limited practical experience with it. My views are as an outsider at the 30,000-foot level.
Surely, the mad rush away from DEI after the new administration came in reflects the perception of legal risk, driven by the view that the government is looking to go after private employers whose practices violate current legal standards or even appear that they might. But the pullback started even before that.
Many large employers had long made efforts to increase diversity in their workforces, especially in the more visible white-collar ranks. My sense is that the push was directed more at advancing the role of women, in part because the social pressure was greater there, given access to opportunity for women directly affects 50.5% of the U.S. population. That DEI focus was pushed along by greater attention on sexual harassment in the workplace and the “Me Too” movement in the mid-2000s. Societal attention shifted to the treatment of Black Americans with the George Floyd killing and evidence of similar tragedies after 2020. That appears to be when DEI as a corporate movement got its big push.
2 theories behind the fall of DEI
Why are employers now backing away? A simple hypothesis is that the attention span of large employers is short. Much of it was taken up by the pandemic, remote work and now investor pressure to squeeze the workforce harder and cut programs.
The second explanation is that the DEI movement expanded beyond where the support was, at least from corporate leaders. Commentators have argued that the issue was with the “E” and “I” in DEI—that support was there for diversity, at least initially, but “equity” and “inclusion” were more amorphous goals. Inclusion, in the sense of supporting a broader range of employee issues, was certainly smart as a way to build a political movement. Equity is now seen as the more difficult concept for employers to embrace, as it can often be seen as trying to equalize opportunity, something that was seen by many as running counter to notions of merit. That topic has been a long-running political hot-button in society.
Harvard University Professor Frank Dobbin’s important and under-appreciated work on diversity showed a decade ago that diversity training programs were backfiring by trying to make white men, in particular, recognize their biases. They resented it, and that led to declines in actual diversity. The view that DEI programs had the goal of changing how people think, and not just changing employer practices, was widespread and unpopular.
We can see evidence of a shift in public opinion from this Pew Research Center poll before the 2024 presidential election.
The share of workers who think that DEI is a bad thing jumped 5 percentage points in one year—a quite remarkable 31% increase. No doubt the attacks on DEI by then-candidate Trump account for some of that decline, but changes that big require a receptive audience.
In short, my hypothesis as to why DEI collapsed so quickly is that support from business leaders, who tend to be more conservative politically than the population as a whole, was there initially for the “diversity” part of DEI as it affected women and Black Americans.
But attention is hard to sustain. Companies are not willing to pay a price for that in terms of legal risk, which is what is happening this month.
I suspect there also was not a lot of thought as to what “equity” and “inclusion” would mean in practice, which is why it was possible to add them to those initial diversity agendas. But it was also easy for those practices to look like liberal political aspirations, which would never be especially popular with some leaders and increasingly less so with the broader public.
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