While this is good – and expected – news, I feel a little cheated.
Companies are ditching DEI because it’s bad for the bottom line; they can practice equality without flogging “equity”.
But notice how it’s framed: “under pressure from conservative activists”.
I mean, if you’re going to “blame” companies’ rediscovering economic and social sanity on people like me, and least call it “pouncing”, for fox’s sake.
Who would have guessed bottom line actually matters to corporate nutjobs? DEI was nadir of virtue signaling with zero financial sense. Let’s hope we never see these three letters in this context ever again.
The company I retired from was hot and heavy on the DEI and ESG stuff before I left, even though the “consumer” of our somewhat esoteric financial products are completely focused on financial results and security. (I may have been marked as a retirement candidate when I asked our outside branding guru – who had just done a long presentation of the power and benefits of a strong ESG score – if our ESG score was going to be more important to our market than our S&P, AM Best, or Moody’s score. “Uhh – of course not, was the reply.)
Perusing the company’s website now, one has to dig pretty deep to find references to DEI and ESG.
It is looking more and more like corporations are finally figuring out that “DEI” is really just the old “Affirmative Action” set-asides and quotas that got them into so much trouble in the 1970s and 1980s, as unqualified “people of minority” were advanced far beyond the Peter Principle over their better qualified peers, leading “the favored few” to abandon achievement because they would be advanced no matter what, and the “cursed many” to abandon achievement because they would not be advanced no matter what they did. And then the executives and stockholders wondered why sales didn’t respond well when the key players really didn’t know what they were doing.
Best thing I see is that Wal-Mart is pulling back in their support of “Pride” events. You would not have figured that it would have taken years for them to figure out that supporting things like the Fulsome Street Fair would tick off their family bread & butter customers, but evidently it did.
I’ll be waiting with bated breath to see if Target follows suit. Last time I checked, they contribute to LGBTQ causes.
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