How corporate America is backsliding on DEI

Household-name companies, like Walmart and Meta, have scaled back diversity, equity and inclusion goals in recent months. These brands are part of a widespread retreat happening across corporate America, according to a New York Times analysis of annual financial filings. It has been as noticeable among tech giants as among drugmakers, concert promoters and nearly every sector of the U.S. economy.

So far this year the number of companies in the S&P 500 that used the language “diversity, equity and inclusion” in these filings has fallen by nearly 60% from 2024.

Seventy-eight percent of companies – 297 out of the 381 that have filed their reports so far this year – continue to discuss various diversity and related initiatives, according to the Times analysis, which examined a decade of financial filings known as 10-Ks that public companies submit each year to the Securities and Exchange Commission. But many of them have softened or shifted previous language, by removing the word “equity,” for example, or emphasizing “belonging” rather than DEI.

Major corporations began to shy away from taking strong stances on DEI before President Donald Trump re-entered office, but the trend accelerated rapidly afterward.

These filings aren’t the only reflection of what companies are doing, or declining to do, to promote diversity, equity and inclusion – but they offer one view of changing stances in the words of the companies themselves. Plenty of language in these filings changes from year to year, though the Times analysis focused specifically on language about DEI.

In some ways, the shift reflects a pattern of companies chasing what seems most socially and politically expedient. After the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, many companies denounced racial injustice. By 2022, over 90% of the S&P 500 had language about DEI in their annual filings. Uber, for example, “committed to becoming an anti-racist company.” Best Buy wrote in a quarterly regulatory filing that “in the wake of George Floyd’s death” the company would strive to “address racial inequities.”

By 2024, the social pressure had started to reverse. “Critical race theory” was labeled by some senators as “activist indoctrination,” and many states took steps to restrict DEI programs at universities. This backlash was accelerated by a Supreme Court decision in 2023 that struck down affirmative action in college admissions. While that decision was not directed at corporations, some law firms began to face lawsuits over fellowships that were open only to marginalized groups, and other employers started to pay more attention.

Trump then took direct aim at corporations. Soon after his inauguration in January, he issued an executive order that instructed federal agencies to investigate “illegal DEI” in the private sector. He changed the staffing and leadership of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces the country’s anti-discrimination laws, putting in place an acting chair who said her priorities included “rooting out unlawful DEI-motivated race and sex discrimination.”

Lawyers who have been helping companies navigate the new legal landscape said that some executives were worried about public disclosures on diversity efforts. Company leaders might want to keep their diversity initiatives in place but realized that describing DEI goals in public documents, like 10-Ks, could prompt scrutiny or government investigation. So some have found ways to hedge or otherwise tweak the language they use to make it more vague.

Dow Chemical and Adobe did not reply to requests for comment on the shift in language in their annual reports.

“You don’t want to provide a road map for critics to look into what you’re up to,” said Jon Solorzano, a partner at the law firm Vinson & Elkins who counsels companies on management issues, including DEI. “Talking about it externally is now viewed as a riskier proposition, while continuing to talk about it internally is maybe less risky.”

Because executives were preparing their 10-K reports right as Trump took office, Solorzano noted, they were able to move quickly to drop public disclosures on DEI, though actually unwinding the programs will take more time. “There’s an annual review of 10-Ks, and the annual review happened to coincide with new fears,” he added.

Other DEI experts noted that some companies were shying away from the term “equity” because it tended to attract more scrutiny than “diversity” or “inclusion.”

“The E in DEI is the real problematic one,” said Musa Al-Gharbi, a sociologist and an assistant professor at Stony Brook University who has written extensively on diversity programs. “To actually achieve equity often requires policies that are alienating to a lot of stakeholders.”

Vertex Pharmaceuticals did not reply to a request for comment on the shift in its 10-K language on DEI. It still has a page on its website on the topic, something that other companies have also maintained – even as it has softened the language on it in its annual regulatory disclosures.

In a statement, a Johnson & Johnson spokesperson said the company “has always been and will continue to be compliant with all applicable legal requirements and remains dedicated to the values in our credo.”

Given the mounting pressures from the Trump administration, it is perhaps surprising that hundreds of companies have maintained DEI language in their 10-Ks this year. Delta Air Lines wrote, “Our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion is critical to effective human capital management.” Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., the insurance brokerage, reported the share of its employees and managers who are “racially/ethnically diverse.”

(The New York Times, which is not in the S&P 500, shortened the section on diversity in its 10-K this year. Danielle Rhoades Ha, a spokesperson for the Times, said, “We still have the same diversity and inclusion-related programs that we did last year.” She added, “Specific language in 10-Ks changes year to year.”)

Still, the pendulum is swinging away from DEI, many corporate lawyers say, and the momentum can be hard to resist. Companies often tend to follow the crowd, whether that means adopting a certain approach to management (think “agile”), a popular strategy on innovation (like “design thinking”) or a job title that many of their peers are suddenly adding (“chief of staff”).

But fads often have shallow roots, and companies might drop that practice as soon as it opens them to social critique or legal scrutiny.

“Companies will adopt these fads and fashions, and they’ll do it for legitimacy and reputation management purposes and never fully adopt it,” said Ranjay Gulati, a Harvard Business School professor. “Then it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, because it doesn’t achieve their business goals, so it goes out of fashion, and they dump it.”

DuPont declined to comment, and Uber did not reply to a request for comment.

A spokesperson for Live Nation wrote in a statement, “While the legal landscape may be evolving, our commitment to inclusivity and Taking Care of Our Own will always remain at our core.” Some of Live Nation’s previously announced diversity goals stated 2025 as the target year to reach them, and previous 10-K documents had said the company was making progress toward achieving them.

An additional factor in the pullback, lawyers say, is some executives’ realizing that they might have set goals in 2020 or 2021 that they cannot achieve without aggressive DEI efforts that might be targeted with lawsuits or investigations in the coming months. Since Trump took office, the EEOC has made clear that it intends to investigate what it sees as DEI overreach, which could include specific targets for hiring employees of underrepresented groups or executive bonuses tied to meeting those goals.

“Some goals based on race and gender that were set during the Biden administration were not reflective of availability in the workforce, potentially operating more like a quota than a good faith placement goal,” said Craig E. Leen, a partner in the employment practice at the law firm K&L Gates. “Some employers are realizing that the goals are not attainable in a legal manner and are therefore resetting expectations.”

To some DEI proponents, the speed of the reversal has underscored the shallowness of some of the initial commitments. “As you’re seeing companies pull back from these commitments, a lot of people are questioning how credible those commitments were in the first place,” Solorzano of Vinson & Elkins said.

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Methodology

The New York Times analyzed a decade of 10-Ks for companies currently in the S&P 500, totaling 25,000 documents. The Times included companies that had submitted an annual report in 2025 as of March 8, which totaled 381 companies. Using custom code, the Times processed the filings with a combination of keyword searches and artificial intelligence tools to identify paragraphs related to diversity, equity and inclusion. Journalists manually reviewed the results to ensure the accuracy of the artificial intelligence classifications.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.