Wall Street reversing DEI, going for white, male CEOs: ‘have decided not to care’

Missing the mark on DEI, corporations attempted moves to avoid the “go woke, go broke” pitfall and found proponents lamenting how businesses “have decided not to care.”

Whether publicly or unannounced, companies have increasingly adopted the frameworks of a social credit system, seemingly more concerned with making waves with global entities than with stockholders and consumers. Now, after promoting executives in favor of advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion has proven a costly business model, a change in course is unsurprisingly being viewed through a lens of race.

Noting how many companies have adopted woke initiatives after the 2020 death of George Floyd in police custody sparked protests and riots, Nani Vishwanath, a facilitator from The Courage Collective told the Daily Mail, “In 2020, we saw a lot of organizations reactively put DEI initiatives in place, knowing that there was a higher degree of public accountability around this topic and conversation, and companies wanted to be on the right side of history.”

“It’s a cyclical world where those who don’t have to care, or have decided not to care, will suddenly have their eyes opened at any given moment in time,” the DEI consulting company employee said. “What we see now is that when something of that surface level is enacted and then there is pushback like we’ve seen now a few years later, it’s really easy for these companies to quickly remove these initiatives because they weren’t deeply integrated from the get-go.”

Research from the executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. found a 15% increase in CEO turnover in 2024 compared to the same time the year prior which included a less than 1% decrease in the rate of hiring women as new CEOs to 27.2%.

In October, CNN Business senior writer Allison Morrow focused on the broad demographics rather than the individual instances as she detailed that 52 Fortune 500 companies were run by women in 2024 and only eight had black CEOs.

Arguing “White Guy CEO never went out of fashion” due to the underrepresentation in executive leadership roles, she noted the removal of CVS Health’s Karen Lynch, Starbucks’ Laxman Narasimhan, and UnderArmour’s Stephanie Linnartz who were replaced with white men.

“But a rash of recent leadership shakeups illustrates the enduring power of the White Guy as a kind of capsule wardrobe for corporate leadership,” wrote Morrow who claimed in spite of the impact of giving companies the “Bud Light treatment” that “DEI initiatives have been shown to boost profits, reduce employee attrition and increase employee motivation.”

As companies felt the pressure thanks to campaigns like that of Robby Starbuck and the Supreme Court’s decision on affirmative action, the writer claimed, “In other words, giant US institutions have created a permission structure for businesses to revert to muscle memory. There may have been a moment, circa 2020-2022, when replacing a person of color or a woman with a white man may have sparked a public relations debacle.”

“Clearly, major companies don’t seem to be sweating the optics anymore,” she concluded.

Countering the laments, reactions on social media were in favor of steering back toward merit-based decisions and a focus on what consumers wanted.

Kevin Haggerty

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