Top companies are laying off thousands of diversity-focused workers, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Major companies that have championed diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, like Netflix, Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, recently announced the exit of high-profile DEI executives, and thousands of employees working in diversity-related positions have been laid off since last year, according to the WSJ. Employee opinions about the importance of DEI and the funding for related initiatives are changing too, with many workers not seeing it as important.
Many businesses rushed to hire chief diversity officers after the death of George Floyd in May 2020, according to the WSJ. Less than half of companies in the S&P 500 had a chief diversity officer position in 2018, but the number increased to three out of four companies having the role by 2022. Data from Live Data Technologies shows that chief diversity officers are far more likely to be laid off than similar positions in human resources, and they have a 40% higher turnover rate with longer job searches, according to the WSJ.
Employee attitudes toward DEI are changing, with only 32% of workers finding it “very important” to work at an ethnically diverse place and 38% saying it’s “not too/not at all important,” according to a Pew Research Center survey. In that same study, 26% of people found it “very important” to have an “equal mix of men and women,” while 44% said it was not important.
Republican attorney generals from 13 states sent a letter to all Fortune 100 companies on July 13 calling for the end of discriminatory hiring practices following the Supreme Court decision that ended the use of race-based admissions at universities. The attorneys general claimed that the practice violates both state and federal law.
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