Pearl River      One company and university after another is dropping any pretense of trying to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI now.  Most of them are doing so either because they claim they are under attack by conservatives; they are trying to align with Trump executive orders around federal monies and agencies; or just want to be with the crowd.  What they are not saying might be closer to the truth, and that is that they are delighted to drop their DEI programs, because, plain and simple, they are bad at them.  The other thing they are not saying, is that Trump is doing them a favor by letting them get rid of these programs which have been such failures and letting them blame him, rather than have to take responsibility for their poor performance.

Think that I’m making this up and just taking a shot at our corporate and tech overlords?  Think again.  An article the other day reported that Google was dropping diversity hiring and would “no longer set hiring targets to improve representation in its work force” with programs and commitments they had made since 2020.  Google says in 2024 that “5.7% of its US employees were Black and 7.5% were Latino.  Four years earlier, those figures were 3.7% and 5.9%, respectively.”  Google won’t admit that it failed, because it was always committed to low-balling and grading itself on a curve – meritocracy claims are for the other guys.  They had said their goal was to improve their numbers by 30%.  By that measure, 5.7% is a 35% bump for Black employment and 21.3% for Latinos.  Both figures are pretty pathetic when you think about the US demographics, especially those of California, New York, and elsewhere that Google has huge employment numbers.  The bottom line is they couldn’t even get there, barely making it with Blacks and failing miserably with Latinos.

I’m not picking on Google.  They are no better or worse than the rest.  The Wall Street Journal reports with numbers and graphs on data obtained from corporate reports to the EEOC that the needle was hardly moving for the general workforce, and was largely stuck for high management positions as well.  Looking at 13 million workers, here’s the skinny,

In the four years since then, the workforces of the biggest public U.S. companies have become slightly less white, and Asian and Hispanic employees have made modest gains, according to 2023 data provided by research firm DiversIQ. The numbers are drawn from reports companies provide on their U.S. workers to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The picture is more lopsided in the upper ranks of these companies. White men have lost a little ground, but still occupy half of all senior manager roles. White women—a bigger focus of corporate diversity efforts before 2020—have experienced the least change since then. The share of senior managers who aren’t white, meanwhile, rose to 26% from 22%. A closer look at specific job categories shows Black and Hispanic employees still make up a small fraction of executive and other higher-paid professional jobs. In 2023, one in 20 senior managers was Black—less than half the share of Black workers in the broader U.S. workforce. Hispanic managers make up a similar share, well below their numbers in the total labor force.

Bottom line, this was largely PR, and definitely not a profit center, and my bet is that they are glad to be rid of it.

Universities can blame the courts, and until they were hammered, some did better, although the elite colleges and universities that give students a glide path to status and success were still disappointing.  Companies won’t say this out loud, but given the speed that many have dropped these programs without any direct demand or provocation, tells us that we all know the real story.

The ultimate irony is that the workforce where this has been a goal longer and that has done a better job is federal employment, which is where Trump and Musk are going totally bananas.  The numbers on the most recent available report tell that story well:

• White: 60% of the federal workforce is white, compared to 76% of the civilian workforce
• Black: 19% of the federal workforce is Black, compared to 13% of the civilian workforce
• Hispanic: 10% of the federal workforce is Hispanic, compared to 19% of the civilian workforce
• Asian: 6.7% of the federal workforce is Asian

It’s not perfect, but a good deal better.  It’s hard not to conclude that the very diversity of federal employment is a key reason that Trump and Musk are hiding behind claims of waste and meritocracy, when a good part of the truth from top to bottom is probably race, ethnicity, and their fears about white and male replacement.