Companies Quietly Recast DEI to Duck Backlash

Corporate America's diversity, equity, and inclusion campaign is going incognito. It's a pragmatic move—unless a company has Harvard-level supplies of fight and funding. Businesses that once trumpeted efforts to hire more women and people of color recognize flaunting such initiatives today is liable to attract unwanted scrutiny from the administration, courts, or influential activists like Robby Starbuck.

- Callum Borchers

Strategies for flying under the radar include ditching the DEI acronym and applying a blander label, like "employee engagement," to similar programs. Some employers are using third parties to recruit diverse job candidates so company career pages don't invite attention. Others are preserving inclusive benefits, like hormone therapy for transgender employees, but no longer advertising 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," says Tope Ajala, whose title at advertising agency Ogilvy changed this year from DEI chief to global inclusion and impact officer. "Is it something you can still work towards internally? Absolutely."

Maybe this strikes you as cowardly. But even some nonprofits that had phrases like "social justice" and "racial equity" in their names are removing those bull's-eyes, figuring the only way to continue their work is to operate more discreetly. It's unrealistic to expect for-profit businesses to be bolder than their idealistic counterparts.

Or perhaps you're miffed to hear about companies doing DEI on the sly because you wanted a full-scale rollback. It is in most companies' best interest to tap wide talent and customer pools, which means keeping diversity as a priority in some form.

To state what should have been obvious from the get-go, businesses approach DEI in whatever fashion they think is best for the bottom line at the moment. Their mistake, and ours, in recent years was acting like these decisions were based on anything but business.

Their goal in the current environment is pursuing diversity goals without being branded as "woke."