Companies that kept policies did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as those that didn’t
Conservative backlash was supposed to put an end to the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) movement as companies were warned “go woke, go broke”.
In January 2025, Donald Trump delivered a death knell, ending DEI within the federal government with executive orders and threatening to target companies that still supported it. Companies including Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s and Walmart that had embraced DEI years earlier fell into line and announced an end to their policies.
But new research published on Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian found that companies that resisted the pressure and kept their DEI practices, including Costco, Apple and Delta Air Lines, performed just as well as their competitors who pulled back.
The issue here isn’t necessarily DEI itself. The fact that some companies performed better after implementing DEI programs and policies doesn’t necessarily mean they performed better simply because they became more inclusive. I think what may have actually happened is that these companies changed their hiring methods and policies in ways that reduced nepotism, cronyism, and other forms of favoritism, creating a more merit-based hiring system. And of course, that can translate into better profits because you’re hiring the best-qualified employees rather than your cousin, brother, sister, or some guy who happens to look like you.
That was the whole point of DEI. Data showed that diverse companies were more profitable. Addressing bias (like nepotism), especially unconscious bias (“I trust this guy more ~because he looks like me~”) was a primary initiative in DEI. The other was to encourage people who don’t normally speak up (either because they never get hired or because the environment is less psychologically safe for people like them) to do so and challenge group think. It was never meant to be”lower the bar”, but it was meant to force critical thinking around what the bar is.
That’s way too nuanced for anti-DEI folks to understand.
I know the other guy thinks I’m not nuanced enough to understand this, but the issue is that you guys aren’t actually understanding the distinction I’m making.
The side effect of DEI was, in many cases, a push toward combating nepotism, cronyism, and arbitrary hiring practices in favor of hiring based on merit. And frankly, that should have been the goal from the beginning. The DEI framework wasn’t necessarily required to accomplish that.
If you simply eliminate or curtail nepotism, cronyism, favoritism, and other arbitrary barriers to employment, you are already creating many of the outcomes people associate with DEI: a broader pool of candidates, more equal opportunity, and greater emphasis on qualifications rather than who someone knows or what social group they belong to.
That’s where I think the problem ultimately becomes one of semantics and framing. It’s similar to what George Carlin was getting at with examples like “shell shock” becoming “post-traumatic stress disorder”: sometimes we change the terminology and then end up arguing about the terminology rather than the underlying phenomenon.
By calling the entire project “DEI”, diversity, equity, and inclusion, the debate became about the meaning and implications of those words instead of focusing on the actual institutional problems we should be addressing.
And we keep doing this for some reason. We give a perfectly straightforward objective a politically loaded name, and then everyone spends their time fighting over the nomenclature instead of fixing the underlying problem.
Combating nepotism is a great idea. Calling it DEI was, in my opinion, a terrible idea.
The better approach would have been to focus on transparent hiring, equal opportunity, eliminating nepotism and cronyism, and selecting people based on their qualifications and ability to do the job. Those principles naturally produce a more diverse workforce when the old barriers to entry are removed.
And that’s the part I think gets lost in the argument: the goal shouldn’t be “including people into the workforce.” People don’t need to be artificially included if the system isn’t artificially excluding them in the first place.
Remove the arbitrary barriers, judge people on their qualifications, and let the resulting workforce be whatever it naturally becomes. That’s a much easier principle to defend than turning the entire discussion into a fight over what DEI does or doesn’t mean.
That was not a side effect, that was the intent. I worked on DEI initiatives. Nepotism, managers higher their friends instead of the most qualified candidate was part of those conversations, they were raised by the employees we talked to. All those things are forms of bias.
Intentionally addressing bias isn’t necessary to combat people who have a bias against those who are not their friends or family?
That’s literally what you’re doing though. You are claiming the problem is how we named it, and arguing if we had only referred to it as something else, it would not have been a problem.
It’s easy to complain about the efforts trying to address a problem, it’s harder to actually put forth that effort.
Also, if a political group wants to demonize something, it doesn’t matter what you name it, they will demonize it. You had states legalizing Civil Unions instead of Marriages for same-sex couples: they STILL demonized the relationships. People like you were saying “the name Marriage is the problem, just call it something else”. We clearly see now that the name was never the problem.
I actually come across this argument fairly often when engaging with people on platforms like this: “No, actually, I was directly involved with forming/inventing the very thing you’re against.” It’s a remarkably convenient argument.
But let’s give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you were, in fact, involved in forming some kind of DEI policy at the company level. You may very well have personally said, “We’re doing this to combat nepotism by design.” I’ll give you that.
But that’s not what DEI, broadly speaking, was intended to accomplish. I literally cannot find anything indicating that combating nepotism was the defining purpose of DEI. As far as I can tell, the stated purpose of DEI was to address discrimination based on race, sex, disability, and other characteristics and to increase inclusion and representation in the workplace.
Now, here’s where I think there is an important distinction. Some of the mechanisms used by DEI initiatives, such as standardized hiring processes, broader recruiting pools, structured interviews, and more objective qualification criteria, can absolutely have the unintended or secondary effect of reducing nepotism, cronyism, and favoritism.
I fully admit there is a connection there, and I would even argue that reducing those practices can be a significant benefit to society. But what something is intended to accomplish, how it accomplishes it, and what ultimately happens as a result are three different things.
A policy can have an outcome that wasn’t its primary objective. If DEI hiring practices happened to reduce nepotism by forcing companies to rely less on personal connections and more on standardized qualifications, that’s an observable outcome. It doesn’t mean combating nepotism was the original purpose of DEI.
And that’s where the “I helped create it, so I know what it was for” argument falls apart. Even if you personally designed a particular corporate DEI program with anti-nepotism objectives in mind, your individual intentions don’t establish the universal purpose of DEI as a concept. You could have designed your program differently from other organizations.
What could have happened and what did happen are also completely different questions. I have no idea what would have happened if these companies had implemented the exact same anti-nepotism and merit-based hiring reforms under a different, less politically charged name. Maybe the outcomes would have been similar. Maybe they wouldn’t have. That’s a counterfactual, and we can’t simply treat it as established fact.
You can sit here and yell at windmills until the cows come home, but changing the terminology doesn’t change the underlying distinction: intent is not outcome, and correlation is not purpose.
And finally, the constant comparison to gay marriage doesn’t really work. DEI and gay marriage are two completely different issues involving different historical circumstances, different policy mechanisms, and different desired outcomes. Whatever similarities exist in the political controversy surrounding them don’t establish that the two issues will, or should, follow the same trajectory.
Well said. What you’re describing reminds me of something I read long ago: essentially, auditioning for a position in an orchestra. But the person played from behind a curtain, so that the listeners/judges wouldn’t have bias. Simple, effective, and you get the most talented players in your ensemble
How to implement best practices, without giving it a label that malicious ass hats can manipulate
Thank you sir. I certainly appreciate it, although I have a feeling that this comment is going to get severely downloaded anyway.