Corporate America’s Attempt to Rebrand DEI Programs
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In business, they say you can have better, cheaper or faster, but you only get to pick two. What if you could have all three? You can with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Try OCI for free at oracle.com/wallstreet. Here's your Money Briefing for Tuesday, June 24th. I'm Julia Carpenter for The Wall Street Journal. Just a few years ago, companies were trumpeting their efforts to hire and promote more women and people of color.

Now, those same companies are taking their diversity, equity and inclusion efforts incognito. So if you're an employee or a job seeker, can you be satisfied with a business's internal policies? Or is it important to you that your employer be a public advocate? I think that's something that you all have to wrestle with. We'll talk with Wall Street Journal on-the-clock columnist Callum Borschers about the evolution of corporate America's DEI policy and its sudden shift into the background.

That's after the break.

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. WSJ On The Clock columnist Callum Borschers joins me to talk more. Callum, what's the strategy behind this shift?

Well, the goal seems to be to keep the business benefits of diversity, but avoid the scrutiny. Conservative activist Robbie Starbuck has shown that he can cause publicity problems for companies like Tractor Supply and John Deere. We saw Microsoft and Wells Fargo get hit with Labor Department inquiries when they set demographic targets a few years ago. And right now we see the funding cuts that Harvard's going through because the Trump administration objects to its DEI practices, or at least that's one of the reasons.

So 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. So the idea is to retain some version of DEI that won't attract unwanted attention.

And some of these changes are overt, you know, removing things from websites, being pretty public, and others are covert, undercover, rebranding, renaming. Tell me about some of the differences between those two actions.

Some of the common steps that companies are taking are just tinkering with the DEI acronym itself or scrapping it altogether. 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. And another strategy is partnering with a third party when you're hiring. So for example, there's a nonprofit called One Ten that matches employers with people who don't have four-year college degrees but do have the right skills for

And the group's CEO pointed out to me that people of color are disproportionately large shares of the non-college educated job seekers. So that's one way that businesses can indirectly access a diverse applicant pool without explicitly saying that's their goal.

And we're in June. June is Pride Month. I've definitely noticed the lack of corporate participation, even from brands that once seemed to cover everything in rainbow colors and have floats in the parade and release special commercials. You took a closer look at what companies like Hertz are doing in this case. Tell me more about what you learned.

Yeah, I think some companies concluded they could do no right here, Julia. I mean, they were getting accused of going too far, of course, by social conservatives, but they were also accused of rainbow washing by some progressives. 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. Ford, Lowe's, Molson Coors are just a handful of the companies that say they won't take this group's survey anymore. You mentioned Hertz as an example. You know, Hertz had a perfect score in this ranking just a few years ago, and now it's down to 75 out of 100. And if you dig into that number, you'll

You know, the ratings for having inclusive benefits and protecting your employees, those all remain very high. The low marks are for lack of public outreach. And that's pretty typical right now. And a lot of these companies don't want to be labeled woke, but they once did, right, Callum? Yeah, this is a shift. The LGBT rights index that the Human Rights Campaign has put together for recent years has been very popular. Like three quarters of the S&P 500 has participated because they want people

They're 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 kind of keeping it more discreet.

I talked to Jay Brown, who's the HRC's chief of staff, and I basically said to him, like, 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 kind of keeping hush-hush about it? And he said, overwhelmingly, it's the latter. You know, 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. And you're

that this isn't just happening in corporate workplaces. Even nonprofits are changing the language they use in an effort to distance themselves from DEI or at least take a step back.

How else are we seeing this ripple through different industries? Sure. I mean, I'm talking to you from Massachusetts where there's a nonprofit called the New Commonwealth Racial Equity and Social Justice Fund that launched after George Floyd's murder five years ago. There were nonprofits like this all over the country. Well, now the group simply goes by the New Commonwealth Fund.

Same mission, smaller bullseye. And, you know, if nonprofits like this are rebranding, then for sure we see these for-profit companies being equally or even more cautious. I also have to ask you, Callum, what does this mean for the average worker or someone job hunting?

You have to ask yourself, how much do I care about my employer's boldness or lack thereof? So I've asked a bunch of DEI professionals whether it's cowardly for companies to shy away from talking about diversity like they used to.

They've all said no. They've said it's just the pragmatic thing to do in the current political environment. So if you're an employee or a job seeker, can you be satisfied with a business's internal policies, or is it important to you that your employer be a public advocate? I think that's something that you all have to wrestle with. And it's an internal question for yourself. It is. You have to say, is it enough for my business to have the practices that I believe in, maybe to offer the benefits that are important to my family? And

As long as they do the right thing, in my view, I don't really care whether they talk about it publicly. Or is it really significant to you that your employer kind of be out there on the front lines in the culture wars? That's just something that job seekers and employees have to think about right now is sort of how much value do you place on the spotlight? That's WSJ On The Clock columnist Callum Borschers. And that's it for your money briefing.

This episode was produced by Ariana Asprey and Coleman Standifer with supervising producer Melanie Roy. I'm Julia Carpenter for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for listening. Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on an elegant Viking longship with thoughtful service, cultural enrichment, and all-inclusive fares. Discover more at viking.com.