People have been talking about the DEI rollback for a while now and a lot of the notes are about how the brands were fake, marketers were cynical, the rainbow logos were always a lie, and, and, and. It's all true, it's old, and it lets almost everyone off the hook.
The real tea in all of this is that the people most responsible for killing DEI this year are the ones who claimed to champion it and fought hardest to get it funded. I mean the strategists and people teams. I mean, some days, me.
Stay with me, because this isn't a piece where I feel bad and you feel better. By the end I want you holding the same thing I'm holding, especially if you work in this industry.
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The business case for diversity was essentially a Faustian bargain that was always going to end this way, and some people warned about it at the time and got told to be pragmatic. Making diversity "profitable" put an expiry date on it. The moment you say "include us because we're a $2 trillion market," you've conceded that inclusion is conditional on you staying a $2 trillion market that behaves. You basically signed a lease.
I’m not going to argue brands should keep DEI because it’s right, but the rollback exposed that most “purpose-driven” branding was cosplay the whole time and the ease and speed of reversing the policies exposed the whole performative nature.
It’s not even that they retreated, it’s how fast and how cleanly, which only happens when nothing structural was ever there.
Turns out none of it was real
If you pull up any big company’s annual report from 2021, Ctrl+F the word “diversity,” you’ll see the number climb. Now, if you pull up the same company’s most recent one and run the same search, for a lot of them, the number is zero.
The word that was an entire section, sometimes an entire page, with infographics, executive quotes and tastefully diverse stock photography, is gone, which tells you how much significance it held to begin with.
The speed is a bigger tell than people realise. I mean, if something is truly wired into a business, you can't pull it in a quarter. It's deeply embedded in the hiring, contracts, comp, the way teams get built, and ripping it out is slow and expensive and it leaves skid marks. You only get to remove something that cleanly when it was never connected to anything.
So this rollback was how we clocked there was nothing underneath to abandon.
Sources: Alphabet removed the DEI commitment language from its annual report and told staff it would no longer set “aspirational goals,” per an internal memo from chief people officer Fiona Cicconi [The Wall Street Journal, via TechTarget, 2025]. Gannett stopped publishing diversity data and removed diversity references from its corporate site [Nieman Lab, via Forbes, Apr 2025].
They ended the "it's in our DNA" excuse for good
IBM added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy in 1984 and added gender identity in 2002. They were ‘doing inclusion’ well before it was fashionable, popular or safe, which is the only time any of this costs you anything.
And when pressure entered the chat, IBM stood their ground at first. A conservative think tank pushed a shareholder proposal to kill IBM's DEI pay incentive, and IBM moved to block it. Yes, damn it! A company that walks the talk.
Then in 2025, goodbye DEI department. Diversity Council, established decades earlier, peace out. Supplier diversity goals shifted off race and gender. And the executive pay link to diversity hiring, the thing they’d fought to protect was cut.
The reason for the reversal was “inherent tensions in practicing inclusion.” Which is a beautiful piece of language, for real. 41 years of practising it just fine, and then the tension becomes inherent. Mind you, tension tends to feel a lot more inherent when there’s a financial line and a boycott’s trending.
IBM had the most structural, most embedded, most genuinely-in-the-DNA version of this that corporate America could produce. And it still had a delete button, which means the problem was never that some companies were faking it… the strongest version anyone built was still reversible in days, the whole model.
Sources: IBM added sexual orientation to its nondiscrimination policy in 1984 and gender identity/expression in 2002 [CIO, 2025]. IBM initially moved to block a Heritage Foundation proposal to drop its DEI pay incentive, then reversed [CIO, 2025]. April 2025 internal memo ended the DEI department and Diversity Council, shifted supplier diversity goals away from race and gender, and stopped linking executive compensation to diversity hiring goals, citing “inherent tensions in practicing inclusion” [Bloomberg, via Forbes, Apr 11 2025; Sustainability Magazine, Apr 14 2025].
Two different rollbacks happened this year, and only one of them is interesting
Tech companies mostly folded because of federal contracts, executive orders, and legal risk. Alphabet basically said we’re a federal contractor, we’re evaluating changes to comply. And sure if you follow the money, they were ‘just complying’ and you can't betray values you were only ever renting.
The second group is more interesting, and I haven’t seen many people talking about them, maybe because they don’t fit the big corp story.
Harley-Davidson. John Deere. Tractor Supply. Molson Coors. Lowe’s. These guys skipped folding to the government, but totally folded to their own customers. Activist, Robby Starbuck, worked out a clever formula: don’t attack a brand for being too progressive in the abstract, attack it for being “out of alignment with its customers,” and then hand the customers the pitchforks. Tractor Supply’s caving “We have heard from customers that we have disappointed them. We have taken this feedback to heart.”
I read that as your own strategy turned into a weapon… to be used against you. Harley spent years courting a newer, more diverse audience. Joined the Wisconsin LGBTQ+ Chamber of Commerce, they ran inclusion training and widened its dealer network. Its actual customers hated all of it and Harley back tracked in a matter of days.
I’ve spent years telling brands their customers co-own them now. That they’re participants, stakeholders, and no longer spectators. This is that idea handed to people I didn’t picture holding it. Co-ownership sounds sweet when it’s a community voting on a sneaker colour. It’s brutal when your core customers force you to undo two years of work they never agreed to, and you discover the people who own the brand were never the people you were trying to court.
Sources: Robby Starbuck campaigns pushed Tractor Supply (June 2024), John Deere (July 2024), Harley-Davidson (Aug 2024), plus Ford, Lowe’s, Molson Coors and Polaris to roll back DEI initiatives [CNN Business, Aug 28 2024; Fortune/Bloomberg, Aug 19 2024]. Starbuck’s framing was that brands were “out of alignment with its customers” [Yahoo Finance, 2024]. Tractor Supply cited customer disappointment in its reversal statement [Yahoo Finance, 2024]. Alphabet cited federal contractor compliance [TechTarget, 2025].
The call was coming from inside the house
All of this reversed so easily because of how it got sold in the first place. And the people who sold it often looked like me.
Back in 2020, if you wanted a diversity programme funded, you didn’t walk over to leadership with a moral argument. The moral argument has no P&L line, it gets a “let’s revisit next quarter,” and then it gets lost in the ether. So you learned to speak the only language leadership actually respected. You built the business case. You brought the spending-power numbers, Black buying power at $1.8 trillion, Hispanic at $2.1 trillion, and you said the thing we were all so proud of “this is a market, and you’re leaving money on the table.”
And it worked. It worked so damn well.
But look at what we actually agreed to.
To get inclusion through the door, we made it pay, we turned a question of dignity into a question of market size, and at the time, nobody wanted to hear this (because some people did say it, and got told to be pragmatic):
the moment you argue “include us because we’re profitable,” you’ve conceded that inclusion is conditional on staying profitable. It wasn’t the seat at the table you thought it was, you’ve signed a lease, and a lease can be broken once the rent stops making sense.
We didn’t lose the argument this year
That’s the bit some folks are missing, we actually won it… back in 2020, in the same language that would later be used to reverse the whole thing. Making diversity a commercial business case is what cooked us and put the expiry date on it. The politics of it all got more expensive, a CFO somewhere redid the maths, and the whole thing got cut like any underperforming line, using the very same framework we handed them to evaluate it.
We built the case, and they used it.
Sources: In its 2022 report (2021 data), the Selig Center for Economic Growth (University of Georgia, Terry College of Business) put African American buying power near $1.8 trillion and Hispanic buying power at $2.1 trillion, within $18.5 trillion total US buying power. The report sells itself to businesses as a tool to “gauge business opportunities” and “guide advertising campaigns” [Selig Center Multicultural Economy Report, 2022].
And the brands still flying the flag are not heroes either
![a young boy in a blue shirt is standing in a grassy field and says " wait a minute who are you "](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!v-9M!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F3f6f448f-cd91-4fc6-b01a-be9552736aea_640x480.gif "a young boy in a blue shirt is standing in a grassy field and says " wait a minute who are you "")
Keeping the language up while changing nothing is the same bet as taking it down, just placed on the other colour.
The ones I'd actually trust are the companies that did nothing this year. They hired how they always hired and paid how they always paid, because there was never a position to hold. Those companies exist, and you can spot them, because they've got nothing to announce. I think this year just sorted the people who meant it from those who priced it.
But I’m not going to leave you with a tidy version where the money decided and we all learned something. Because the trap hasn’t closed at all, it’s in plain view, before everyone forgets.
It’ll be fashionable again. It always comes back. And when it does, someone will rebuild the business case, and it’ll get funded, and it will bloody work, and for a few years it’ll feel like a win.
And you’ll know. You’ll know you’re building the same reversible thing in the same reversible language, because it’s still the only language that gets budget.
I’ll know it too. I’ll probably build it anyway. Knowing it’s a trap doesn’t give me a better argument to walk into a business with. It just means next time, I won’t get to be surprised.
Back in 2020 we sold diversity to leadership as a money argument, because that was the only argument they’d hear. It worked. And it’s the reason all of it came out so cleanly five years later. If you sell something as good for business, it is demolished once it stops being good for business.
We made it about the money. So in the end, the money decided.
Ayo
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