Section 01What the 2023–2025 'DEI Backlash' Actually Was, By the Numbers
Between mid-2023 and the end of 2025, U.S. corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs went through their most public retrenchment since the function existed. The story most often told — "companies abandoned DEI" — is partly true, partly hyperbole, and partly the opposite of what actually happened. The function did not disappear. It moved, fragmented, rebranded, and in many cases got better. The defeats were also real.
This piece tries to do three things. First, count what actually changed. Second, separate the programs that were defensible substance from the programs that were not. Third, lay out what works in 2026 — for employers who want to do this seriously, and for workers, particularly workers from underrepresented groups, navigating a labor market where the function is in flux.
The actual numbers from the public record:
The honest summary: about a fifth of Fortune 500 firms publicly retrenched, and most of that public retrenchment was a rename rather than a teardown. Below the Fortune 500 — at mid-market firms, at small businesses, at universities, at nonprofits — the pattern is messier and harder to count, but the same broad pattern of consolidation rather than abandonment holds.
Section 02What Drove the Retrenchment
Three forces converged in 2023–2024. None of them alone would have produced the retrenchment. Together they did.
Force 1: The Supreme Court's Students for Fair Admissions decision (June 2023) ended race-conscious admissions in higher education. Within months, the same legal theory was being pressed against corporate diversity hiring, scholarship, and mentorship programs. By mid-2024 the EEOC was issuing guidance clarifying that "DEI initiatives" did not, in themselves, violate Title VII — but the legal uncertainty was sufficient to cool many corporate programs. Several major firms (notably in publicly-regulated industries) restructured race- or gender-targeted programs to be more open-eligibility in order to reduce litigation exposure [3].
Force 2: The empirical underperformance of the unconscious-bias / single-shot-training paradigm. The 2024 Devine, Forscher, et al. meta-analysis of corporate diversity training found that single-session unconscious-bias trainings produce small, short-lived effects that decay within weeks [4]. This was not a new finding — Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev had been publishing the same conclusion since 2006 — but the 2024 meta-analysis arrived at a moment when corporate executives were already looking for justifications to cut. The data made the cuts easier to defend internally.
Force 3: Activist pressure campaigns. A small number of conservative legal organizations and individual activists ran a deliberate, public campaign in 2023–2024 to identify and pressure corporate DEI programs. The most visible targets — Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, John Deere — retreated publicly within weeks of being singled out. The campaigns demonstrated that the political cost of maintaining a high-visibility DEI program could be material, and that the corporate-comms playbook for defending one was underdeveloped.
What is notable in retrospect is that the firms most exposed to all three forces — the consumer-facing brands with high-visibility programs and significant regulated-employer exposure — retreated, while the firms exposed to only one or two (B2B, professional services, tech) mostly did not. The retrenchment was selective.
Section 03Which DEI Interventions the Evidence Actually Supports
The retrenchment is a useful moment to rebuild the inventory. Below are the interventions on which the evidence base is strongest, drawn from Dobbin & Kalev's Getting to Diversity (2022), the broader peer-reviewed literature, and the 2024 Iris Bohnet review [5][6].
| Intervention | Evidence base | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Structured interviewing (vs. unstructured) | Strong — multiple meta-analyses across 60+ years | Reduces hiring bias; improves hiring validity; ~0.3 SD improvement in subsequent performance |
| Blind résumé review | Strong — multiple field experiments | Roughly halves the callback gap between equivalent resumes with different demographic signals |
| Mentorship programs with matched senior sponsorship | Strong — longitudinal Dobbin/Kalev data | Largest single intervention for promotion rates of underrepresented groups; effects compound over multi-year horizons |
| Targeted recruitment from underrepresented pipelines | Strong | Measurable shifts in pipeline composition; effect on hiring outcomes only if other steps are also structured |
| Manager accountability via demographic outcome reporting | Strong, though politically contested | Single largest determinant of whether other interventions stick |
| Pay equity audits, with adjustments | Strong | Immediate compression of within-firm pay gaps |
| Affinity / Employee Resource Groups | Moderate | Strong retention effect; modest effect on hiring and promotion outcomes |
| Inclusive-language style guides | Weak | No measurable behavioral effect |
| Single-session unconscious-bias training | Weak / null | Small effects that decay within weeks; can backfire when framed as mandatory remediation |
| Performative public commitments without measurement | Negative | Workers report cynicism; correlated with attrition of the workers the commitments target |
The table separates substance from theatre. The interventions in the top half are the ones the field has known are effective for at least a decade. The interventions in the bottom half are the ones whose absence from a serious DEI program would not damage outcomes — and whose presence has, in many corporate programs, crowded out the budget that should have funded the top-half interventions.
Section 04A Taxonomy of What the Programs Got Renamed To
The 2024 corporate-comms rebrand of DEI is informative — both about what the function was actually doing and about what it is becoming. A field taxonomy:
"Belonging." The most common rebrand. Usually signals a narrowed focus on the inclusion dimension (workplace climate, ERG support, manager training on inclusive practices) and a quieter exit from the equity dimension (representation targets, pay audits, promotion-process redesign). Whether this is a substantive shift or a comms move varies by firm; the diagnostic is whether the headcount reporting still includes representation outcomes.
"Talent Strategy" / "People Experience." Absorbs the DEI function back into a broader people-operations remit. Often retains the substantive work (structured interviewing, pay audits, mentorship) without the brand. The risk is that without dedicated leadership, the work gets the budget and attention residual to whatever the talent-strategy team is doing this quarter.
"Inclusive Hiring." Narrows the function to the hiring funnel specifically. This is often a strong design choice — the hiring funnel is where structured interventions have the strongest evidence base — but if it is paired with abandonment of the promotion and retention dimensions, the pipeline filled at the top of the funnel leaks at every subsequent stage.
"Employee Experience." A broader rebrand that subsumes DEI alongside benefits, workplace technology, internal communications, and culture. Sometimes substantive; often a sign that the dedicated function has been dispersed across too many remits to be operationally meaningful.
No rebrand. Roughly 60% of Fortune 500 firms maintained their DEI branding through the retrenchment period. The pattern is regional and sectoral: tech, professional services, and pharma have largely held the brand; consumer-facing retail, agriculture, and heavy industry have moved away from it.
The question is not whether the program is called DEI. The question is whether anyone is still running structured interviews, auditing pay, and sponsoring underrepresented talent into the senior roles. That is the work. The name is the comms. Lily Zheng, DEI Deconstructed (Berrett-Koehler, 2022) — paraphrased from subsequent commentary
Section 05What an Employer Should Do in 2026
The 2026 task for an HR leader serious about this work is to consolidate the substantive interventions and let the theatre go. Three concrete moves:
- Run an honest audit of the existing program against the evidence table above. Catalog what the firm is currently spending budget and attention on. Categorize each line as "strong evidence," "moderate," "weak," or "performative." Reallocate the bottom two categories into the top one within a single planning cycle.
- Tie manager performance evaluation to representation outcomes in their team. Dobbin & Kalev's most consistent finding across decades of corporate data is that this single accountability mechanism is the variable that determines whether other interventions work. The accountability does not have to be quota-based to function; it has to be reporting-based, with senior-leadership attention.
- Decide on the brand and commit. "Belonging," "DEI," "Inclusive Hiring," "Talent Strategy" — any of them can carry the substantive work. Oscillating between them every 18 months damages both the work and the credibility of the function. Pick a name for the work the firm intends to do, and let it stabilize.
Two things to deliberately stop:
- Mandatory single-session unconscious-bias training. The evidence is unambiguous that this format produces no durable behavioral change and produces measurable backlash. If unconscious-bias content is included in the curriculum, it should be embedded in structured manager training that runs for longer than a half-day session and that includes practice and feedback components.
- Performative public commitments without measurement infrastructure. Pledges to hire X% from any underrepresented group, made without a tracking system, a manager-accountability mechanism, and a public progress report, produce more cynicism than progress. If the firm cannot commit to the tracking, it should not make the headline pledge.
Section 06What Workers Can Do, Particularly Workers from Underrepresented Groups
The 2024–2025 retrenchment shifted some of the navigation burden back onto individual workers from underrepresented groups. Four things that show up consistently in the research and in NWLB community conversations:
- Diagnose the firm's program before you join it, not after. The interview-stage diagnostic that produces the most signal: ask the hiring manager, "What do you do when a hiring decision splits along demographic lines between equally qualified candidates?" The answer reveals whether the firm has built infrastructure for that moment or is improvising. The signal-to-noise on this question is higher than the signal on any "what's your DEI commitment" question.
- Sponsorship is non-substitutable. Mentorship is helpful; sponsorship — a senior person actively advocating for you in rooms you are not in — is what determines promotion outcomes. The empirical data on this is unambiguous (Catalyst, Center for Talent Innovation, multiple longitudinal Dobbin & Kalev studies). Invest in the sponsorship relationship deliberately; do not wait for a formal program to assign you one.
- ERG networks compound. The data on Affinity / Employee Resource Group membership shows a strong retention and promotion effect that compounds across years. The mechanism is partly network capital (sponsorship, weak ties, internal mobility) and partly informal information transfer (who is actually hiring, what is actually being evaluated). In the post-2024 climate, ERGs in many firms have become more, not less, important relative to formal programs.
- The labor market is real. A firm whose internal program has been dismantled is signaling something about its priorities. The strongest signal you can send back, if your firm is in this category and the substance is not there, is to move to one of the firms where it is. The 2026 labor market still has firms that have meaningful programs; they are findable.
Section 07What This Is Actually About
The fights over DEI in 2023–2025 were, on the surface, about programs and policies. They were, underneath the surface, about a more fundamental question: does the firm have an obligation to outcomes — for the workers it hires, for the markets it serves, for the communities it operates in — that goes beyond the immediate transaction? Or is the firm's responsibility entirely encompassed in fair process within the existing labor market?
Reasonable people answer that question differently, and the answer determines whether the substantive work above feels like core function or like overreach. The honest place to land, in our view, is that the strongest version of the work — structured hiring, pay audits, sponsorship, manager accountability — is defensible on both readings. It produces better hires, better decisions, and better outcomes by any reasonable measure, and it does not require subscribing to any particular philosophical position about the firm's broader obligations.
The performative version of the work, by contrast, is hard to defend on either reading. It is what got cut, deservedly. The substance got cut alongside it, undeservedly. The 2026 task is to rebuild the substance without rebuilding the theatre.
DEI as a brand may not survive the decade. The structured interviewing, the pay audits, the mentorship-and-sponsorship architecture, the manager-accountability mechanism — that work survives, because it is the only work that ever moved the numbers.
If you are a leader rebuilding this function in 2026, or a worker navigating it, join the NWLB community — the practitioner conversations are private, the resource library is current, and the network across firms is the most useful thing on offer.
