The Wall Street Journal reports that corporate America is backpedaling away from “diversity”:
White-collar companies that once championed programs to recruit diverse employees are now tiptoeing away from them.
PricewaterhouseCoopers and JPMorgan Chase are among those that recently removed or altered descriptions of their programs for underrepresented students. The shift came after an “anti-woke” movement took aim at U.S. companies and a Supreme Court decision overturned affirmative action in college admissions.
Employers’ embrace of diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives peaked in 2021, sparked by the death of George Floyd and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement a year earlier. In the years since, access to diversity programs has been slowly declining, a Glassdoor study in April found.
The trend away from DEI is mostly quiet:
Companies have made the changes quietly, often by playing down terminology such as “DEI” and opening up programs once reserved for diverse applicants to everyone. Many stopped referencing their DEI programs in annual reports altogether, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
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Law firm Kirkland & Ellis now clarifies that its diversity and inclusion fellowship is open to all second-year law students, regardless of their backgrounds. JPMorgan Chase has done the same for its Black and Hispanic & Latino fellowship programs, adding that all sophomore students regardless of their background are welcome to apply.
Why are companies changing course? The linked Journal article rather obtusely fails to note the real reason: DEI is illegal.
The two main areas in which race discrimination is illegal are education and employment. While there are some nuances, the basic principles are the same. While race discrimination in both spheres has theoretically been illegal for a long time, there was a gentlemen’s agreement that the *right* kind of race discrimination is not just acceptable, but admirable. “Affirmative action” goes back to the 1970s. No one was ever able to explain how affirmative action, or its more recent incarnation DEI, could be reconciled with the race neutrality that the law requires.
The decisive break came when the Supreme Court decided the North Carolina and Harvard cases. That decision held that the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act mean what they say: race discrimination is illegal. Those cases arose in the education context, but every company in America realized that the same principle will soon be applied to employment.
That, rather than any change of heart, is what drives the corporate retreat. While not making this explicit, the Journal article hints at the truth:
Some companies are no longer tracking demographic data related to diversity because they fear that it poses a litigation risk if they make hiring decisions based on identity or race, said Jailany Thiaw, founder and chief executive of upskill, a job-recruitment platform.
Exactly. They don’t want to create evidence of patently illegal conduct. So “minority” programs are now open to all, but it remains to be seen who actually gets hired.
The future, as to these issues, is impossible to foresee. For decades, corporate America has been committed to race discrimination, believing it to be virtuous. But many companies, while they would never admit it, must have seen adverse consequences from abandoning merit as the lodestar of hiring and promotion. Maybe companies will fight against the new regime–the 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act–tooth and nail, if surreptitiously, holding out for the day when the Democrats again control the Supreme Court. Or maybe they will breathe a sigh of relief and go back to nondiscriminatory hiring and promotion policies.
Most likely, I suppose, there will be some in both camps. But what made affirmative action/DEI work is that all the substantial companies and every government agency did it. Thus, to the extent that not being a meritocracy hurt corporate performance, it wasn’t much of a competitive disadvantage. So if, in the post-Harvard world, some companies continue to engage in race discrimination, they may pay a price.
