Johnny C Taylor Jr said. Photograph: Maskot/Getty Images
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies within US companies will “come under full-out attack in 2024”, the president of the largest US human resources organization in the US has said.
“It’s going to become a hot-button issue this year,” Johnny C Taylor Jr, president and chief executive of the Society of Human Resource Management, told reporters. The national shift to be more inclusive that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020, and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, is already fading, he said. “We’re already seeing companies go away from it.”
Following Floyd’s murder and figures that showed how hard communities of color had been hit by the Covid pandemic, companies across the US pledged to make their workforces more diverse and tackle racism.
“Covid and the murder of George Floyd kind of shine the spotlight on something that we already knew,” the JP Morgan boss, Jamie Dimon, said during an interview in 2020. “We’ve had racial inequality in this country since way before the civil war and we haven’t done a particularly good job of fixing it.”
Taylor suggested the reset could be as strong as the backlash against the environmental, social and governance (ESG) movement that was critical of the fossil fuel industry. Texas in 2022 banned companies like BlackRock from doing business with the state because of their work with ESG investing.
The backlash to DEI policies is already becoming clear. On Friday, Elon Musk posted on his social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), that “DEI must DIE”.
“The point was to end discrimination, not replace it with different discrimination,” Musk wrote.
The reversal comes after the US supreme court struck down affirmative action in higher education this summer. While the ruling did not explicitly mention company DEI policies, the conservative movement that brought the issue to the supreme court in the first place has its eye on DEI in the workplace.
The American Alliance for Equal Rights, run by the conservative legal activist Edward Blum, filed a lawsuit over the summer against the Atlanta-based venture capital firm Fearless Fund, which focuses on funding companies run by women of color. In September, a federal appeals court in Georgia halted a Fearless Fund grant program that would have given $20,000 in funding to Black female entrepreneurs because of the lawsuit.
Taylor said that companies are carefully considering their diversity goals and initiatives. Employee resource groups (ERGs), or affinity groups, have become a “really big point of contention” within companies, as have policies that tie leadership compensation to diversity goals.
“The question is how companies can say ‘we aspire to be more diverse’ without being prescriptive,” Taylor said, noting that comments about goals to make a workforce a specific diversity percentage could, for example, be taken as a type of quota. “That will run afoul with the supreme court decision.”
Taylor said that 2024 will be a “reset moment” for DEI policies.
“We’re three years after what happened in 2020, and we think it’s time to say, ‘Did that work’ and make certain adjustments to our approach to diversity,” he said. “Having different experiences, perspectives and people will ultimately yield a better result. But it’s how you get to [that] ... how does this all work out?”
