Earlier this month Wall Street Journal columnist Callum Borchers filed a report that continued to confirm what NLPC has contended since last year — that corporations which claim to dial back diversity, equity and inclusion are not doing so at all. Instead they are rebranding and/or hiding it better, due to public backlash against the policies and President Trump‘s prioritization to expunge it from the federal government. We called attention to Borchers’s findings in our own post which can be viewed here.
Yesterday Borchers was interviewed on the Journal‘s Your Money Briefing podcast on Tuesday about his story, and offered more insights about what he was told about the head-fake across Corporate America to give the impression — with little or no evidence — that companies are eliminating DEI. A few salient comments and exchanges from Borchers’s responses to interviewer Julia Carpenter’s questions:
Carpenter: Some companies are rebranding DEI as employee engagement and removing diversity reports from their websites. All with the hope that in downplaying these programs, they can avoid scrutiny from the right…
Borchers: …the goal seems to be to keep the business benefits of diversity, but avoid the scrutiny. Conservative activist, Robby Starbuck has shown that he can cause publicity problems for companies like Tractor Supply and John Deere…A lot of companies don’t want these headaches, but they don’t want to abandon diversity completely either because they still want to tap into wide talent pools when they’re hiring. And of course, they still want to appeal to a broad customer base. The idea is to retain some version of DEI that won’t attract unwanted attention.
Carpenter: Some of these changes are overt, removing things from websites, being pretty public and others are covert, undercover, rebranding, renaming.
Borchers: Some of the common steps that companies are taking are just tinkering with the DEI acronym itself or scrapping it all together. For example, I met recently a former DEI chief who is now called Chief Impact and Inclusion Officer. You see businesses that are trying to keep that inclusion element, tying it explicitly to the business impact and trying to signal to potential critics, hey, we’re doing this for bottom line reasons. You’ve also seen companies that have disbanded their DEI departments keep many of the same components, and they’ll just call them, as you said, at the top employee engagement efforts or something, a little bit blander like that. Another strategy is partnering with a third party when you’re hiring. For example, there’s a nonprofit called OneTen that matches employers with people who don’t have four-year college degrees, but do have the right skills for the job. The group’s CEO pointed out to me that people of color are disproportionately large shares of the non-college educated job seekers. That’s one way that businesses can indirectly access a diverse applicant pool without explicitly saying that’s their goal.
Carpenter: June is Pride Month. I’ve definitely noticed the lack of corporate participation…
Borchers: …What we do see right now is a lower key approach to Pride Month and LGBT advocacy in general. I think there’s no question about that. One way it shows up is participation or not participating in an annual gay rights ranking that’s put together by a nonprofit called the Human Rights Campaign.
Carpenter: A lot of these companies don’t want to be labeled woke, but they once did.
Borchers: Yeah. This is a shift. The LGBT rights index that the Human Rights Campaign has put together for recent years has been very popular. Three-quarters of the S&P 500 has participated because they want their employees and they want job seekers to know, hey, we offer all these inclusive benefits, so it could be equal adoption benefits for same-sex couples, or it could be hormone therapy for transgender employees. They wanted the world to know that they offered these things and now they’re not necessarily taking them away, but they’re keeping it more discreet. I talked to Jay Brown, who’s the HRC’s chief of staff. I basically said to him, what are you hearing from these companies when they pull out and say they’re not going to participate in the survey anymore? Are they telling you they’re actually going to claw back some of the benefits and protections, or are they just keeping hush-hush about it? He said, overwhelmingly, it’s the latter. What they’re telling us is, hey, we still believe in all the same things. We just think that in the current environment, the prudent thing to do is to be a little more quiet about it.
Got that? As NLPC has stated repeatedly on our website and at corporate annual meetings, companies like Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Mondelez, PepsiCo and Visa are more than happy to continue providing child mutilation services for employees through their dependent health care coverage.
@Disney #discriminates against #detrans – we will confront them at the company’s annual meeting on April 3 … #Disney #detransition #discrimination @WaltDisneyCo @donoharm @JanuaryDoNoHarm @ChoooCole @RobertIger — WATCH BELOW: pic.twitter.com/491hBPpOhp
— NLPC (@NLPC) March 27, 2024
In addition to those, corporations including American Express, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s, Merck, and Walmart are snookering customers and shareholders about repeal of their DEI policies.
Our full archive of exposing fake DEI rollbacks at U.S. corporations can be found here.
