Deloitte, the largest accounting firm in the world, recently took a step back from DEI. In an email sent out a week ago the company announced it was sunsetting certain DEI goals.
“We will sunset our workforce and business aspirational diversity goals, our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Transparency report, and our DEI programming,” Doug Beaudoin, Deloitte’s chief people officer, told employees in an email sent on Monday and seen by Business Insider.
He wrote that the changes followed “a detailed review of all pertinent government directives to ensure we comply with their requirements, both as a private enterprise and as a government contractor.” That review was in line with “others in the marketplace.”
A few days after that email was sent, the company asked employees to remove pronouns from their emails.
Consultants at the Big Four firm who work for the US government were asked last week to remove pronouns indicating their gender from emails sent externally, according to people familiar with the details.
All of this is in response to President Trump’s executive orders on DEI and the fact that Deloitte has a lot of government contracts.
Deloitte received about $3 billion from the U.S. government in the last fiscal year, according to federal data. That includes nine-figure amounts from the Department of Defense, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Department of Homeland Security.
As of 2024, Deloitte employed more than 170,000 people in the U.S. across 136 offices. The London-based company is the largest by revenue and number of employees worldwide of the Big Four accounting firms, which also include EY, KPMG, and PwC.
Because the company is based in the UK where Trump’s EO’s obviously do not apply, the response from the UK division has been very different.
Hours after Deloitte’s US staff were informed of a decision to “sunset” the company’s DEI reporting, and ordered to remove pronouns from their email signatures, Deloitte UK CEO Richard Houston sent a memo to UK staff confirming that its diversity initiatives would “remain critical to our firm.”..
Unlike the US, Houston said the auditor’s UK branch will remain “committed to our diversity goals” and “continue to report annually on our progress on inclusion.”
He added that diversity networks “will remain critical to our UK firm” and indicated that shifting government priorities in the US will not influence his organization’s stance: “Events in the external landscape do not change our commitment to building an inclusive culture and helping all our people to reach their full potential.”
Meanwhile, Deloitte isn’t the only firm making this change. Goldman Sachs is also backing away from DEI.
Goldman Sachs has ended its restriction on underwriting companies with all-White, all-male boards in the United States and Western Europe, becoming the latest corporate behemoth to evaluate its equity and inclusion practices at a time when President Donald Trump is stepping up attacks on DEI policies.
“As a result of legal developments related to board diversity requirements, we ended our formal board diversity policy,” Goldman Sachs spokesman Tony Fratto said in an emailed statement. “We continue to believe that successful boards benefit from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, and we will encourage them to take this approach,” Fratto added…
In December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit struck down a Nasdaq rule that required companies listed on the exchange to have at least two corporate board members from “diverse” backgrounds or disclose in filings why they did not. The court ruled that the requirement, which was approved by the Securities and Exchange Commission in August 2021, exceeded the SEC’s authority.
Richard Gnodde, CEO for the company, told the BBC that he thought the policy had “served its purpose.” That didn’t go over well with Amensty International.
Goldman axes diversity rule because they “think” it has served its purpose! Shameful submission to the racist and sexist agenda of powerful actors in the US. Resist; Stand Up; Fights Back. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again. https://t.co/XzerqvFwqh
— Agnes Callamard (@AgnesCallamard) February 12, 2025
Finally, Google is also taking a small step backward though I wonder if this particular case isn’t because they were open to lawsuits for illegal hiring.
Google will no longer use hiring goals to boost workforce diversity as the company continues to evaluate its diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) practices in the wake of President Donald Trump’s executive orders, according to a Wednesday email to employees…
In 2020, Google set “aspirational hiring goals” to improve representation, Cicconi noted, “but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals.”…
According to its 2024 diversity report, about 33 percent of Google’s U.S. employees were women, 5.7 percent of its employees were Black, and 7.5 percent were Latino.
Clearly, Google is deeply racist. At least that’s what we’re supposed to conclude. Most of the efforts being discussed here were adopted in 2020 in response to BLM. Obviously that group hasn’t faired as well in public opinion since then.
