On May 8, Colgate-Palmolive held its annual shareholder meeting, and investors voted on a National Legal and Policy Center proposal to remove race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation from the criteria the company uses to select its directors.
The institutions that cast those votes have spent the past 18 months issuing press releases, restructuring DEI departments, and generating favorable news coverage for their supposed abandonment of diversity, equity and inclusion policies.
Anyone paying close attention knew the rollback was theater. The Colgate vote is the curtain call.
The Head-Fake Had a Paper Trail
The warnings were there for those who looked. When Walmart made headlines in late 2024 for its alleged DEI pullback, a closer read revealed that the company had been actively avoiding DEI accountability just months earlier — and had confirmed that its announced changes were reviews already underway, not a change of course. NLPC’s verdict at the time: “Call us skeptical. Distrust and verify.”
McDonald’s was equally instructive. When the company rebranded its diversity team as the “Global Inclusion Team” in January 2025, the move drew comparisons to renaming “global warming” as “climate change” — a cosmetic update designed to neutralize criticism without changing anything substantive. DEI metrics remained embedded in executive pay formulas, which the board defended aggressively.
Six months later, McDonald’s own Chief Field People Officer gave it away at an HR conference in Chicago. “At the core,” Jordann Nunn told attendees, “none of our programming has changed… we have no intention of doing that.” The financial press had already moved on to the next rollback announcement. The facts had not changed.
Disney‘s alleged retreat drew similar scrutiny. Rebranding “Business Employee Resource Groups” to “Belonging Employee Resource Groups” and replacing a “Diversity & Inclusion” executive pay metric with a “Talent Strategy” metric constitutes no substantive change — a conclusion that pro-DEI publications reached independently, noting that Disney had merely updated its vocabulary while preserving every underlying program.
When the Data Caught Up
By summer 2025, the evidence had become impossible to ignore.
The Wall Street Journal documented in granular detail how companies were rebranding DEI roles under titles like “Chief Impact and Inclusion Officer” and “employee engagement coordinator” while preserving the underlying functions. One former DEI executive was candid about the arrangement: the goals hadn’t changed, only the language used to describe them. “You can’t be as explicit as saying, ‘I want X% of my leadership team to be a certain demographic’ because that’s a compliance thing right now,” the executive explained. “Is it something you can still work towards internally? Absolutely.”
The Conference Board put numbers to what observers had been describing qualitatively. Its August 2025 analysis found that while S&P 500 companies reduced DEI language in securities filings by 68%, those same companies increased board committee oversight of DEI programs by 79% over the same period. The acronym went underground. The agenda stayed.
NLPC tracked this pattern as it developed and has documented it extensively. The hashtag #WeToldYouSo has earned its place.
What Colgate Revealed
Against this backdrop, the Colgate-Palmolive vote is not an isolated data point — it is a window.
NLPC brought shareholder proposals targeting DEI board criteria to five major corporations this proxy season. American Express, Deere & Company, and Goldman Sachs all negotiated changes (Johnson & Johnson had already made the changes; the company just needed to update its website), removing identity-based language from their board candidate qualifications. Colgate alone refused, brought the matter to a shareholder vote — and prevailed by a margin of nearly 97 to 3.
The institutions behind that 97% are not passive actors. They are the same firms — major asset managers, index fund giants, public pension advisors — that have been reported on in the financial press for backing away from DEI. But when those institutions were forced to cast a public, on-the-record vote on a proposal asking one company to do exactly what those institutions claim to have done themselves, they voted no.
That is not a retreat from DEI. That is DEI with better public relations.
The rollback made for good press. The Colgate vote told the truth.
