People march in Toronto's Pride Parade last June. The festival recently lost three multinational companies as sponsors.Arlyn McAdorey/The Canadian Press
Rob Csernyik is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
The only DEI training I recall taking part in at work is a blurry memory. It was 2018, and Starbucks famously shut down North American cafés – forgoing at least US$12-million in revenue by some estimates – so baristas like me could attend a few hours of racial bias training.
Ever since U.S. President Donald Trump issued an executive order to claw back government diversity, equity and inclusion programs and weed them out among federal contractors, that afternoon feels even more distant.
In rapid succession since Mr. Trump’s late January announcements, major corporations have taken a wrecking ball to DEI programs, eliminating jobs, cancelling initiatives and cutting equity targets. They cover an array of industries and companies, from Disney and Google to Walmart and Ford.
Though homegrown corporations haven’t widely followed suit in Canada – at least not yet – the international nature of the companies makes it a cross-border issue by default. Pride Toronto recently lost three multinational companies as sponsors for its 2025 festival, a possible side effect of the purge.
With DEI in freefall, the corresponding moral panic from professed supporters is fascinating to observe. It is often a lament for DEI programs at their most ideal, a state these programs have yet to attain. The frustration expressed is ostensibly over a loss of economic mobility and equality for long-marginalized groups, although DEI has never quite achieved that. What the movement has achieved, though, is catered personal development lunches for executives.
There aren’t easy-to-compare standards to assess the success of DEI programs, but I suspect that if the DEI initiatives being dumped were as robust and successful as companies previously led stakeholders to believe and the convictions as virtuous, we wouldn’t see such a conspicuous reversion to the mean. Instead, companies would make bare-minimum alterations to comply with the new consensus or hold fast to DEI commitments; they wouldn’t shout goodbye from the rooftops.
The panic over recent developments implies DEI initiatives have been a universal success. It is the same folly as believing that any company with pride-themed marketing or green initiatives is a good LGBTQ ally or environmental champion. Yet, astoundingly, people fall into this trap.
Though this skepticism over corporate social initiatives has been around for at least a generation, people are rightly more skeptical today, lest companies be venerated prematurely. The terms “greenwashing” and “queerwashing” reflect the belief that not all efforts in those fields, even if their aims are noble, are equally beneficial or useful. They recognize that some companies value style over substance for ESG efforts.
This discernment between style and substance isn’t universal, but still, stakeholders are rightly demanding more context on the achievements and objectives linked to these initiatives. The DEI wave of the past five years has grown too rapidly, creating a multibillion-dollar industry in its image, according to Global Industry Analysts Inc.
If DEI is to remain part of the corporate world, this current reckoning for the movement is necessary. Even some DEI practitioners have called for reform.
Among the critics, Lily Zheng – themself a DEI consultant – wrote for the Harvard Business Review of the industry’s lack of efficacy and meaningful outcomes. In a recent follow-up for HBR discussing DEI’s future, they still contend the mainstream approach wasn’t working.
Those meant to benefit from DEI programs are also raising the alarm. Black business owners interviewed by Reuters said that even before Mr. Trump’s orders, Biden-era policies didn’t close the equity gap.
Some supporters of the movement act as though questioning whether all DEI efforts are equally valuable means disagreeing with them wholesale. But people questioning queerwashing or greenwashing should not be viewed as critical of the LGBTQ community or environmental issues. Instead, such queries should be viewed as healthy skepticism about the efficacy of the programs and the motivations of the companies behind them.
The desire to track the success of these efforts is not pointless oversight, it’s part of the belief in the mission. Contrast this with the discussion on DEI that too often centres on politics and punditry, deflecting attention from more pressing flaws.
The business world is built on facts and figures – the hard data that build economies and move markets. There are ways to use this information to build functioning programs to promote equity, but the current reassessment of DEI shows the consequences of the lack of healthy skepticism around it: total condemnation from one wing of the political spectrum and coddling from the other, with neither approach helpfully furthering equity. It’s no wonder companies are seizing the moment to ditch their DEI programs.