More than 200 S&P 500 (^GSPC) companies scrubbed words such as “diversity” and “equity” from their annual reports in 2025, according to Freshfields, a law firm and data provider, and nearly 60% fewer S&P 500 companies are using the phrase “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
These new counts provided by Freshfields reinforce a widening corporate retreat from DEI this year after scrutiny of diversity policies intensified in Washington, D.C.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order ending federal DEI programs and ordering US agencies to “combat illegal private sector DEI actions.”
Some big companies, including Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), McDonald’s (MCD), Amazon (AMZN), JPMorgan (JPM), Target (TGT), and Tractor Supply (TSCO), have proactively announced about-faces on their diversity policies.
Tractor Supply CEO Hal Lawton told Yahoo Finance last month that the company’s goal in changing its DEI policies was to “remove” itself “from any sort of discourse that people viewed to be political or social in its orientation.”
Many are also swapping out words such as “diversity” and “equity” from their annual reports and instead using terms like inclusion, belonging, and meritocratic workplace.
“We’re observing a shift in language,” ISS-Corporate executive director Kosmas Papadoupoulos said.
Bank of America (BAC) and BlackRock (BLK) were among the firms on Wall Street that made such changes.
Bank of America removed all eight references to “diversity and inclusion” in its report filed in February, compared with its filing the year before.
In several places, the nation’s second-largest bank replaced “diversity” with “opportunity,” including renaming the diversity and inclusion group within its human resources department the opportunity and inclusion group.
BlackRock, the world’s largest money manager, also removed four references to “diversity” in its latest annual report, including replacing a section titled “diversity, equity and inclusion” with one called “connectivity and inclusivity.”
JPMorgan Chase has also dropped almost all mentions of “diversity, equity, and inclusion” from its annual report and rebranded its diversity programs to “opportunity” initiatives.
‘Nobody knows what to do’
What’s not happening so far in 2025 is any shareholder support for DEI changes of any type, for or against.
None of this season’s investor-led DEI-focused proposals that went to a vote received majority shareholder approval, though the percentage of “anti-DEI” filings compared to “pro-DEI” filings has jumped in recent years.
