<
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/dei-policy-company-performance>
"Conservative backlash was supposed to put an end to the diversity, inclusion
and equity (DEI) movement as companies were warned “go woke, go broke”.
In January 2025, Donald Trump delivered a death knell, ending DEI within the
federal government with executive orders and threatening to target companies
that still supported it. Companies including Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s
and Walmart that had embraced DEI years earlier fell into line and announced an
end to their policies.
But new research published on Friday and shared exclusively with the
Guardian
found that companies that resisted the pressure and kept their DEI practices,
including Costco, Apple and Delta Air Lines, performed just as well as their
competitors who pulled back.
For the research, Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor at at the University
of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, analyzed how S&P
500 companies fared after Trump’s January executive order. He used what
economists define as “abnormal returns” – the difference between how a stock
was expected to perform versus how it actually performed – to isolate the
impact of a company’s DEI decision.
What he found was the firms that kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI
shareholder resolutions did just as well financially, even after Trump’s
executive order, as firms that didn’t. In the days after the executive orders
were signed, companies that kept their DEI policies actually performed better
on the stock market than those that didn’t."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
