The trend away from DEI, and specifically away from DEI hiring goals, kicked off last month when Google announced they would no longer be pursuing this strategy. Here's how Google's Chief People Officer explained it in an interview/memo sent to employees.
Our users come from all across the US and around the world, and we serve them better when our employees do, too. Every year, we review the programs designed to help us get there and make changes. And because we are a federal contractor, our teams are also evaluating changes to our programs required to comply with recent court decisions and U.S. Executive Orders on this topic. For example, in 2020, we set aspirational hiring goals and focused on growing our offices outside California and New York to improve representation. We'll continue to invest in states across the US — and in many countries globally — but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.
What do aspirational hiring goals look like in practice? They sound a lot like hiring quotas.
Google set a goal in 2020 to increase leadership representation of Black, Latino, and Native American employees by 30%. It reached that goal in 2022, the company's 2024 annual diversity report said.
Hiring quotas based on race are illegal but hiring goals based on race are legal under certain circumstances according to the ACLU, which has a whole page devoted to making the case for hiring targets. Apparently one of the requirements is that the goals have to be temporary an not rigidly applied.
There seems to be an eye of the beholder issue here regarding whether a particular set of hiring targets meets the standard. My guess is the Trump administration is less likely to look favorably on this than the Biden administration did.
In any case, Google's announcement was the first of many. Bank of America, Citigroup and Wells Fargo made similar announcements at the end of February.
The second largest U.S. lender dropped references to its diversity hiring goals and a rule requiring hiring managers to consider a diverse group of candidates, according to an annual filing on Tuesday.
The changes depart from policies laid out in the bank's proxy statement last year.
"We evaluate and adjust our programs in light of new laws, court decisions and, more recently, executive orders from the new administration," a bank spokesperson said.
And Wells Fargo:
Wells Fargo, one of the Des Moines metro's largest employers, has ended a policy that required a diverse slate of candidates in the first round of interviews for senior-level roles in the United States, Bloomberg News reported, citing a memo to staff...
The bank had unveiled a number of diversity initiatives in 2020, including tying executive compensation to reaching inclusion goals.
And Citigroup:
On Thursday, Chief Executive Officer Jane Fraser announced she was ending the diversity, equity and inclusion goals she set out less than three years ago in what was one of the industry’s most ambitious and concrete commitments, citing an executive order by President Donald Trump that banned “illegal DEI” policies by federal contractors like her bank.
It is also a sharp change from five years ago, when George Floyd’s murder prompted executives across the industry, including Fraser, to push loudly on behalf of underrepresented employees in their firms and among clients. Trump’s legal threat could now undo Wall Street’s slim progress — and come as a relief for executives who by many measures were failing to show meaningful results anyway.
The latest big company to drop hiring goals is Salesforce which made an announcement earlier today.
The San Francisco-based software giant filed its annual financial disclosures on Wednesday. The company removed language that outlined how some executive compensation was tied to employee diversity measures.
The latest disclosures also omit explicit language describing diversity and inclusion as core company values, focusing solely on equality.
"While we are not specifying representation goals, we remain committed to our core value of equality," a Salesforce spokesperson told Bloomberg when asked about the company's hiring process.
In other words, they are also dropping the specific target numbers, just like Google did. Some of this may just be a rebranding effort but if so it's a smarter one than most companies have pursued. The new documents repeatedly emphasize equality with no mention of equity. Whoever came up with the new approach is clearly responding to some of the actual criticisms of equity as a concept. It may or may not be honest but it's smart.
Marc Benioff has a reputation as a very left-wing billionaire but he's recently angered some on the left by apparently tacking to the right. For instance:
Congratulations to President @realDonaldTrump and his Family on your remarkable achievement. This has now become a time of great promise for our nation, and we look forward to working together to drive American success and prosperity for all. May Gd Bless The United States of… pic.twitter.com/KVDRnOuBNC
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 7, 2024
That could be written off as a kind of strategic positioning but some things Benioff has said recently seem a lot harder to dismiss.
One of the most compelling 2 hours I’ve spent listening to a world leader. I had greatly misunderstood Javier Milei. His holistic perspective on economics, philosophy, society, history, and spirituality is profoundly inspiring. ❤️🇦🇷 https://t.co/awWSh6ZspV
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) November 24, 2024
It matters because if all of this is just strategic on the part of these corporations, they'll shift back the moment a Democrat is elected president. On the other hand, if people running these companies are having genuine second thoughts about the whole DEI project then maybe this becomes more of a lasting change.
