Dive Brief:
- Walmart is rolling back several diversity, equity and inclusion programs, the company confirmed to HR Dive Tuesday, joining a slew of other large U.S. employers.
- The company will not renew a five-year commitment to create a racial equity center and has ended its supplier diversity goals. It also ended participation in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index. Anti-DEI activist Robby Starbuck claimed credit for Walmart’s announcement in a post to X on Tuesday.
- “We’ve been on a journey and know we aren’t perfect, but every decision comes from a place of wanting to foster a sense of belonging, to open doors to opportunities for all our associates, customers and suppliers and to be a Walmart for everyone,” the company said in an email.
Dive Insight:
Walmart’s decision is a landmark one for those who spent years pushing back on DEI’s momentum. Starbuck, in his post, called it “the biggest win yet for our movement to end wokeness in corporate America.”
The successful prompting of a DEI rollback at the world’s largest private company demonstrates just how far the pendulum has swung on a subject that, for a brief moment, consumed culture to the point that it all but forced employers to pivot.
Once a topic de rigueur in board rooms, DEI’s fall has been a gradual one. DEI professionals have long faced backlash not only from external voices, but also from departments within their own organizations.
The first signs could be seen in 2023’s early months, when an economic downturn produced fears among HR teams that cash-strapped businesses would cut DEI teams first. External pressure on organizations cranked up in the meantime, exacerbated by events such as the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 race-based admissions decision and subsequent lawsuits against corporate DEI programs.
By early 2024, these external pressures were already weighing on executives. A Littler Mendelson survey of executives published in January found that, while most respondents were still committed to DEI, nearly 3 in 4 said that handling politically divisive topics had become a challenge in the workplace.
Then came the summer of 2024 and with it, a cascade of big-name brands ending their DEI commitments. They included Microsoft, Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, Ford and Molson Coors, among others. SHRM, the world’s largest HR organization, further signaled the sea change when, after years of promoting DEI efforts throughout the HR profession, it revamped its own platform to remove references to equity.
For Zach Nunn, founder and CEO of experience management firm Living Corporate, Walmart’s move is an overreaction to public backlash against DEI, but it is not entirely unlike the kind of decisions Walmart and other brands made during the initial wave of company DEI announcements in 2020.
“I believe they're overindexing, similarly with how they overindexed initially with all the performative nonsense — this is also performative,” Nunn said in an interview.
Nunn said he was most surprised by Walmart’s decision to halt the collection of demographic data when determining financing eligibility for supplier contract grants. That is in part because of the role that having data-driven information can play in determining how to best hone customer experience, he added, while efforts to encourage supplier diversity can help companies better resonate with their customers.
“When you stop collecting data, there’s just a degree of willful ignorance that is hard to ignore,” Nunn said. “That is just bad, silly business.”
Public perception of DEI has declined in the last year as well; according to a Pew Research Center report published last week, workers were slightly more likely than in 2023 to say that focusing on DEI is a bad thing.
However, 52% of workers in the Pew report nonetheless said that focusing on DEI at work is a good thing, and respondents were more likely to say that DEI practices helped rather than hurt Black, Hispanic and Asian men and women, as well as White women. DEI rollbacks, meanwhile, are also unpopular with certain segments of the talent market, especially LGBTQ+ adults, according to a recent Human Rights Campaign survey.
The decisions of Walmart and other employers have not caused DEI professionals to abandon all hope, however. Instead, those who have spoken to HR Dive discussed how news of rollbacks encouraged them to refocus, rebrand and reshape their priorities.
“Irrespective of who’s sitting in the White House or what talking heads are saying, employees are going to want to be treated with respect, and your talent will always matter,” Nunn said.
