In January, Google became the latest in a string of businesses to announce that it is scaling back its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. The tech giant joins other US companies, including Meta, McDonald’s and Amazon, which have made similar announcements in recent weeks.

It’s a domino effect undergirded by a seismic political shift following Donald Trump’s recent election victory. As a federal contractor, Google is required to comply with Trump’s recent DEI executive order. The new directive champions ‘colourblind equality’ and claims to protect “the civil rights of all Americans and expands individual opportunity by terminating radical DEI preferencing in federal contracting”.

Despite being dressed up as a well-intentioned push for meritocracy, Trump’s takedown of DEI so early in his presidency is a calculated play. He’s able to appease so-called anti-woke activists who’ve grown increasingly hostile towards DEI, spurred on by tycoons such as Elon Musk, who seems to be revelling in the mounting controversy.

“DEI is being used as the boogeyman [because of] this idea that something’s been taken away from what we have set as the norm: white cis men,” says Virginia Cumberbatch, the CEO and co-founder of Rosa Rebellion, who is working to reshape DEI in America’s creative spaces. “It’s the idea that DEI has taken away from me: it’s taken away from my economic power, it’s taken away from my cultural power.”

The new executive order also encourages federal agencies to “relentlessly combat private sector discrimination”. It paints a bleak picture of what’s to come for the US workforce, which saw major private employers like Walmart, Ford and Harley-Davidson jump the DEI ship towards the tail end of the Biden-Harris administration.

With so many reported benefits of DEI – including improvements to financial performance, innovation and adaptability – the rationale that has led to its abolishment raises more questions than answers. Perhaps if companies asked more questions when deciding to adopt DEI practices, we’d see less of them backing away from their commitments today.

Hayley Bennett, founder of DEI consultancy HTVB Consulting, says: “Organisations will come to me and we’ll work to create their shared vision for this kind of work. I ask what it is that they actually want to achieve with DEI, and the answers will range from ‘We want to play our part in creating a more just and equal society’ to ‘We just want to make sure that we are not breaking the law when it comes to discrimination legislation.’

“So, you’ve got some organisations that have committed to being inclusive without really understanding that it will involve culture change, completely different ways of working and tackling some of the norms associated with what they see as professionalism, success or innovation. Some have made the claim that they want to do something, but when it comes to actually delivering on that, they’ve realised it’s very hard and maybe they don’t know how to do it, so it’s easier to give up or to lower those expectations.”

Though this might feel like the path of least resistance, Dr YingFei Héliot, senior lecturer in organisational behaviour at the University of Surrey, thinks the potential fallout could seriously impair colleague morale. “We have to think back a few years when DEI started to become more popular and there was more effort put into it. The reason companies wanted to do this is because they realised that organisational culture can only be built based on people,” she says.

“You need to create an inclusive culture so people feel psychologically safe, and this idea of psychological safety is very important within organisational culture. If you remove something like DEI, you are removing a pillar of organisational culture which, along with trust and a positive environment, takes years to build.”

Thankfully the corporate climate in the UK is far less contentious than in the US as it relates to what we typically refer to as ED&I (equality, diversity and inclusion). The Equality Act 2010 (which applies to England, Scotland and Wales) also prohibits employers from discrimination based on the protected characteristics of: age, disability, gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, race, religion or belief, sex and sexual orientation. Despite this, a recent survey of 140 UK employers found that almost seven in 10 (69%) foresee Trump’s executive order affecting UK businesses.

In the US, growing DEI scepticism is being further fuelled by the president, who last month baselessly blamed a deadly Washington, DC, plane crash on disability recruitment. Others have relished the chance to chime in, alleging that the Los Angeles Fire Department was unable to contain the wildfires that engulfed large swathes of the city in January because they’d been preoccupied with DEI. In the wake of a vehicle-ramming attack and an attempt to set off pipe bombs that killed 15 in New Orleans on New Year’s Day, a Republican representative managed to link the tragedy to DEI, remarking that “the priority of the last four years has been DEI, not IEDs… talk to anyone who’s willing to speak within these agencies, that’s what their focus has been.”

Cumberbatch adds: “It’s more than just the fact that this is federal legislation. It has planted the seeds of this type of rhetoric and this type of mindset into leadership across the country. Now [companies] are concerned with, for example, ‘How’s [DEI] going to affect my bottom line? Is this impacting our ability to tell certain stories?’

“For those of us who’ve been doing this work, it’s not surprising. We knew that 2020 was going to be a short-lived momentum shift. So yes, this is deflating; yes, this is disappointing, but the resistance will continue.”

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