The DEI landscape has shifted dramatically since Rights CoLab published What Is DEI? Market Signals of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2022. In the intervening years, corporate commitments have splintered, political backlash has accelerated, and the frameworks companies rely on have struggled to keep pace. To understand what this moment demands, Rights CoLab mapped and analyzed 741 indicators across 35 sustainability, human capital, and DEI-related frameworks, and developed a 16-action roadmap grounded in anti-discrimination law and business resilience. The findings are captured in What’s the Matter with DEI? A Reset.
Following the report’s release, Alison Taylor invited Joanne Bauer and Elli Siapkidou to discuss the findings and explore what a more constructive path forward looks like for companies navigating a polarized landscape. Alison is a Clinical Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, author of Higher Ground, and writer of the Substack newsletter of the same name, which reaches a broad community of practitioners working at the intersection of business, ethics, and sustainability.
This interview was first published on June 9, 2026 on Alison’s Substack, Higher Ground. It was recorded on video and has been lightly edited and condensed.
Alison Taylor: Good afternoon, Joanne and Elli, and welcome. I have really been looking forward to this conversation, which is about exploring your new report on the current status and challenges of DEI and what to do next. So the first question I have is, tell us about the background and scope of this project and your key findings.
Joanne Bauer: Alison, thank you so much for having us here. I wanted to start actually congratulating you on something you recently posted on LinkedIn about the Forbes conversation you had with Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey. We agree with you that the institutions and the initiatives that have enabled the business case have really sort of collapsed, and that we need to reinvent new forms of accountability and get back to a basic sense of morality. This is very relevant to what we want to talk about today.
The project does have a bit of a background. My two cofounders of Rights CoLab and I saw a real advantage in being more experimental in figuring out solutions to pressing human rights challenges. We started with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and said, if we could get human rights into these standards, that would be a really significant thing—imagine freedom of association and collective bargaining widely agreed as financially material.
This was a hard sell, but then 2020 hit, and the largest corporations were falling all over themselves to prove that they were more responsible than other companies. And our effort to actually integrate human rights into sustainability standards suddenly became possible. SASB engaged us to work on diversity, equity, inclusion. Why?
Because investors were determined it was financially material, absolutely financially material. And they said: We must have better DEI standards. So first we did a project on standards, but then when Trump got re-elected, I said we have GOT to do something about this, and Elli felt the same way, and here we are. This new report covers 35 frameworks, and I believe it’s 749 now metrics that are in use on DEI, that we manage to synthesize into a roadmap of what needs to actually happen within companies, struggling with all these frameworks during this very messy time.
Alison Taylor: Okay, so follow up question. So, at a high level, your agenda is to advance human rights globally, and there was energy from 2020 to 2022 around the first report, where the implicit argument was that there’s the strongest or most compelling business case for DEI through the lens of maximizing human capital. You gathered all that data, then you saw coming from a million miles off, because who could have missed it, this kind of chilling effect going on on DEI. So now your goal is to really show why this is perverse and unhelpful, and to gather the evidence about what we need to do next?
Joanne Bauer: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Elli Siapkidou, PhD: And I think that it wasn’t as clear as that when we started. As we found our footing in real time, this new report became a blueprint for the way out for companies who are completely lost, or completely threatened, or completely destabilized by the political environment, especially in the US. And that wasn’t quite as straightforward back then as it might sound now.
Alison Taylor: And this leads into my next question, which is about what your latest report actually found. And I’m going to ask you about both the EU and the US.
And I will just tell you in that dark period, where I don’t think I’ve been so depressed in years as in February 2025, when the scale of what was going to happen unfolded—I was pretty confident initially that there would be pushback from the EU, that the EU would hold the line, that we would see a countervailing force from the EU. I thought actually I’d be doing more work in the EU. We can also talk about how DEI has a slightly different profile in the US versus the EU because of the specific history of both geographies.
But one of the things that I think has been most disappointing and concerning for me, whether we’re talking about DEI, or human rights, or sustainability writ large, is that the context and discourse in the US seems to have somewhat affected, or infected, the discussion in the EU. So curious about your reactions there. But can you talk to us about what the headline findings are for how this topic, and the treatment of it, has evolved in both geographies?
Joanne Bauer: The headline is that DEI hasn’t so much collapsed as it’s splintered. And so I would say, when we were in the Business Roundtable era, and with everything that was happening in 2019, 2020, 2021, until we started to get the ESG and DEI backlashes, that this field had really moved, DEI had generated broad corporate commitment, and it was building. And, it had been building since much earlier than 2020.
Only recently did we start to call it something like DEI, maybe within the last decade. And when #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements exploded, this led to rising interest and even pressure to demonstrate this commitment. And in a matter of months, this moved into something much more contested, risk-managed, and often rebranded. In Europe, at least, DEI is more anchored in law, and in regulatory frameworks, and things like transparency requirements, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, although certainly we’ve seen some chipping away at that.
I do think what we’re seeing a transatlantic fragmentation of the landscape, where companies are really trying to preserve this core talent management function while avoiding the politically charged DEI language.
In the US, I want to be really clear that the shift has not just been about rebranding; there’s certainly an absolute avoidance of talking about DEI, but it’s also a real rollback.
There are a number of concrete examples that are tracked in the media: IBM shifted its supplier diversity goals away from race and gender. Gannett said it wasn’t going to publish diversity data anymore. Victoria’s Secret halted its goal to increase Black representation. AT&T and other companies pulled back on participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
And then of course, there’s Target, which is probably the most visible case. Everybody knows it moved so quickly, literally the day or two after the executive order, to end all of its major DEI initiatives, including its three-year diversity goals. And then there was this big consumer backlash. Store visits fell, I think by about 4%. And the stock price declined. It was a contributing factor, though of course not the entire story, behind Target’s stock price decline.
So in terms of what’s driving it, of course the Trump administration was a major accelerator, but that wasn’t the sole cause. You’ll remember this year’s State of the Union where Trump mentioned that “We ended DEI in America” to huge applause on the Republican side. But, the backlash had already been building for several years. It was building at the moment we released our first report in August 2022. Another key moment was the Supreme Court decision on students for fair admissions versus Harvard, which came in 2023, and struck a major blow against affirmative action. And then alongside that, you have these anti-DEI laws in the States and broader anti-ESG campaigning. So what changed in 2025 is that this became a much more coordinated push at the federal level.
You’ve got executive orders, the contract ultimatums to companies, reinterpretations of civil rights law, and all of this reframing DEI as discriminatory. That huge applause that Trump got from Republicans is reflective of the fact that this idea was really resonating across a significant portion of the public, because it taps into this broader narrative that had been pushed by people like Tucker Carlson and Robbie Starbuck around this notion of reverse discrimination and white grievance. And so we’re just in a whole new territory, and this really raised the legal and reputational risks for companies.
Alison Taylor: So just for a clarifying point, because I don’t know that this is clear for everyone, the law hasn’t actually changed. The frame of DEI historically in the US has been around ‘protected classes.’ So certain social identities have certain legal protections.
That actually hasn’t changed. But now that notion of protected classes is being weaponized. So you have a number of lawsuits, for example, from white people saying they were being discriminated against for being white in specific companies.
So I think this is misunderstood. And so just to kind of ask a little bit more about that, and how that maybe differs from the EU as well.
Joanne Bauer: Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. It’s absolutely true. And one of the most infuriating things, if you read the executive order, is how it’s crafted in this way that it does reflect the core of anti-discrimination that’s in the Civil Rights Act, but again, weaponizes it against people who have been historically marginalized and so forth.
And so, now the Equal Opportunity Office in the United States has a big poster that it’s put out that every employer is supposed to put up on their wall and that what to do if you’re facing discrimination due to DEI. It flips on its head everything that the Civil Rights Act was intended to be.
The civil rights community has been fighting, and their lawyers are very, very, very clear about this. PolicyLink, which is an organization that I think is doing outstanding work, and especially during this time, does these ‘just and fair’ business briefings every month or every few weeks or so. And they’ve brought on lawyers who have been very clear that nothing has changed, and that as lawyers, we need to be emboldened on these points.
All of this has had, and continues to have, ripple effects well beyond Washington, as we can see by the behavior of American firms. It has emboldened critics, it has encouraged companies to retreat or rebrand. And it’s helped to normalize this idea that DEI is politically risky rather than strategically necessary.
Our report is called What’s the Matter with DEI?, which was meant to be sort of a triple entendre, if there’s such a thing. So it’s like, what’s wrong with DEI, and then sort of what’s so bad about DEI, sort of like kind of the reverse nuance.
And then the matter is kind of like, what is the content of DEI? What’s the matter with DEI?
Alison Taylor: Got it. I have a riff on materiality in there as well!
Joanne Bauer: Yes! And I would say on the European question, though the picture is different, the EU is not immune. I think the legal framework still remains stronger, particularly around gender equality, things like pay transparency, and so forth.
But we’re seeing a quieter form of deprioritization in Europe, for example, as part of the regulatory simplification, some DEI-related indicators were narrowed or removed. It’s no longer necessary to report on contingent workers, while focusing on contingent workers is something we think is incredibly important today when we’re talking about creating an anti-bias, anti-discrimination workplace. So in Europe, I would say it’s less a direct political backlash than in the US, and it’s kind of more gradual dilution, which has also been influenced by corporate lobbying.
The fact is, DEI has different historical roots in the two contexts, right? In the US, it has its roots in the Civil Rights Act. So there’s a strong emphasis on addressing systemic racial inequality and its ongoing effects. And in Europe, DEI has tended to focus more on gender equality and labor market inclusion.
So I feel like that difference shapes the backlash. In the US, it’s really closely tied to race, demographic change, national identity even, particularly as the country moves very rapidly towards the majority-minority population, which is seen as quite threatening. Whereas in Europe, it seems that the anti-immigration sentiment sits more separately from the core DEI debates.
Alison Taylor: That’s interesting. Elli, anything to add there about the perspective from the US and particularly how much the discourse in the US has influenced how the EU treats and sees these issues?
Elli Siapkidou, PhD: Yeah, so I would add a few things. So first of all, obviously the EU is 27 different states. And very recently, you had the UK in there as well.
And each one brings its own history and its own relationship, some states with a stronger sort of imperialist history and roots, and some of them less. So then I think it’s quite spot on what Joanne mentioned about race. In the US, DEI is very much about race, and the EU is wider, and more focused on gender. I mean, even as we speak, this year, the European Commission has rolled out a gender equality strategy that will be implemented across the European states, because that’s an easier thing for European institutions to enact, and they can monitor it and they can enforce it.
I don’t think race is such a priority in the EU. Though it is a priority in the UK again, because of its past and the way minorities have been treated here. And, some of the legal frameworks are very robust, such as the Equality Act of 2010 in the UK. Some of the directives are at a European level, but then we also see laws at the nation-state level, where they have specific percentages for women in France, in Spain, in Sweden. So it’s a patchwork of legislation.
But also, you’ve got the European Commission, which can navigate some of these issues and storm ahead outside of politics. On the political side, obviously, in the US, you have a completely different system, you have one federal country, and you have different states and different jurisdictions, but it is one administration and one president, and the EU doesn’t have that. Sadly, you don’t even have at the moment the leadership in the past that could go against the way of Trump’s politics across many issues, DEI being only one of them.
But I think for the companies that operate in the EU or operate at a global level, which is almost one of the key audiences of the report, is that inevitably, if you are a global company operating in both jurisdictions, you will follow the lowest common denominator. So if you want to stay out of trouble in the US, you’re going to lower your expectations in the EU as well.
Although for some of these companies, you get into trouble because some of the legal frameworks are pro-DEI in the EU, even with the watering down of the ESRS and the CSDDD and the Omnibus and the overall simplification. It seems that this was driven much more out of lobbying by companies to simplify and reduce the reporting burden, but DEI is not nearly as controversial as it has been in the US.
Alison Taylor: That makes sense. So this is about convenience and reporting expense. There’s also the whole question of privacy, do we categorize ourselves by racial identity the way we’re asked to do in the US. We’ve been dancing around the idea that you can categorize people by social identity, you’ve got certain protected classes, you’ve got certain groups suffering historic inequity, and one of the critiques you engage in in the report you know, including from researchers like Alex Edmans, is that it’s been an an error all along to take that social identity categorization approach—which we might call the diversity approach. So there was somewhat of a notion that if you have a mix of social identities in the boardroom and the C-suite, then suddenly all your inclusion problems would be solved! So, a lot of scholars argue that what we’ve done is to prioritize that kind of Noah’s Ark approach, let’s say over the equity and the inclusion element.
I think there are also critiques of the equity element, with people in the US arguing that equity politically loaded, and connected to progressive agenda, as opposed to to a meritocracy approach. So, let’s just pick apart the letters for a second! What did you find here and then what is your informed opinion on the right way to think about this?
Elli Siapkidou, PhD: So I’ll go with the data, then maybe Joanne can talk a little bit more about representation. What we did find, compared to the previous report, was that when you analyze the frameworks and the indicators, that there was a rise in the so-called diversity or representation indicators. So compared to 56 percent back in 2022 this increased to 63 percent in terms of the total frameworks. By that I mean the indicators like percentages of women on the board, percentages of people from that particular sort of ethnic background in your C-suite, so there was an increase and we did touch upon the debate on representation. Joanne, do you want to carry on on the representation point?
Joanne Bauer: This was one of our observations in the first report—by far the dominant metrics were, as Elli said, over 50 percent of the 429 metrics were on were representation metrics. We understood why this quantitative, ‘easy outcome’ indicator is being reported—we are all looking for outcome indicators.
But there’s a problem with this emphasis. The representation metrics are an incomplete signal of performance. Equity is really the foundation of successful DEI strategies. The literature says that typically representation and leadership roles have been used as a proxy for company culture, but the link is never that straightforward. There’s always the risk of tokenism when your women are appointed to the board—do they understand their role is to represent all women within the organization? If a person with brown skin is appointed to the role, is that their job?
The representation metrics also fail to capture where the power actually lies in the corporation—so often you’ll get women in senior management roles as head of HR, chief sustainability officer, but these are not the jobs where the profit and loss responsibilities lie. The other problem is that when we think about vulnerable or disadvantaged groups, it’s very context-specific. Often, these frameworks do not treat it as context-specific. Beyond gender, of course which is roughly 50 percent of the global population, how can you know whether what’s the ‘right’ percentage of a specific demographic group? How does anybody know? How do you capture that intersectionality, and how do these data points signal something meaningful?
That is one of the things that we try to correct in the roadmap. What do you do about needing to give special consideration to the recruitment and retention of historically marginalized people? Meritocracy is a big, big buzzword in the Trump administration, the reason that the Trump administration not only gets away with this, but also has a mandate among his supporters to do this, is that it sounds very sensible that the best person should get the job right and be rewarded for the best work. And that feeds into the notion that DEI is rewarding cheating in some way.
Meritocracy actually requires removing structural barriers so that talent and effort can actually determine the outcomes, rather than who you know or what elite university you attended or who’s in your network. Diversity initiatives were really meant to be a way to do that, and framing them as the opposite has really revealed this misunderstanding over whether and how you need to address those gaps for a meritocratic process.
What’s very, very clear is that if you’ve got diversity without equity and inclusion then you really don’t have diversity at all. So, when we were struggling with addressing historically marginalized people, we came back to the idea that what we really need to do is the most important thing: develop clear, transparent systems and processes that are available to all prospective and current workers. Not just employees but non-employee workers, contingent workers, which make up 30 to 35% of the US workforce and that’s expected to rise to 50% over the next 15 years. A very vulnerable group of workers.
Alison Taylor: So where do we go from here, what questions have been missing from the debate?
Joanne Bauer: First, disclosures need to catch up on contingent workers, that’s clear. And the question of AI and disclosure frameworks—this is an acute area where disclosure is lagging, that’s for sure. And finally, do companies have a robust discrimination risk management, anti-discrimination risk management or discrimination risk management system? We spell out what that looks like.
You absolutely do have to keep tabs on diversity, but you also need to know who’s being promoted, why people are leaving, who’s getting in the door, what’s happening. There’s a lot of emphasis in HR on sentiment and climate surveys and so forth. Those need to be ramped up, done well, and continuously reviewed and checked. And so, if I were an investor, I would be more interested in those pieces of it.
And finally—if there’s just one quantitative thing to do, it would be pay equity.
If a company can get those things right, those would be pretty good signals for DEI.
Elli Siapkidou, PhD: What has been missing from the debate for me, especially in the US, given the politicization and polarization, is that there needs to be sort of a head-on conversation that this is about access, and this is about power. And historically, certain groups have held the power, while for others, access was limited.
So then linking that to your representation and diversity targets. Yes, diversity and representation metrics are not enough, but they do serve as an indication and an important market signal from the outside for investors. But if investors are really looking to understand the performance of a company on this type of issue, I think the risk discrimination management system that we talk about is very important because on the one hand, you do track your demographics and your different groups within the organization.
You do look at the various incidents, whether these are incidents about people leaving, or about any incidents that are being flagged in terms of whistleblowing. But most importantly, look at why people are leaving.
Are they being left out? Are they being pushed out? And I think this is going to be even more pertinent as AI kicks in and the pie is just squeezed and becoming smaller and smaller for everyone because all companies are being pushed from all directions to adopt AI.
And in the end, is that going to just exacerbate the existing inequalities that exist in the workplace?
Alison Taylor: I’m watching this wider AI and worker dignity and Gen Z resistance whole conversation evolve. It’s interesting to me that resistance to data centers has the potential to be bipartisan, whereas ESG and DEI, for a load of reasons we need an entire other conversation to unpack, has become politicized. I think this gets back to this very American question of how much America is willing to acknowledge some of its historic challenges.
I’m British, so we spend a lot of time exploring the fall of empire and the loss of global power, and havign these kind of conversations. And it feels like America is still not ready to have that conversation.
Joanne Bauer: Yeah. Can I make one more point related to this? And that is that the harms from what we’ve seen in the last year have already disproportionately fallen on women, Black women.
And the data is there in the report. Inequality continues to grow, economic and wealth inequality, income and wealth inequality, it continues to grow dramatically. We include in the roadmap a way to forge worker security, because that is a driver, and insecurity is a driver of discrimination.
And it has to be addressed, via a living wage and via CEO-worker pay, which is a very scary topic for corporations to address.
Alison Taylor: Yeah. I mean, those topics that you just named seem foundational, seem bipartisan. That seems like maybe an error that we didn’t make those topics central in the beginning. And then perhaps we all need to think about social identity as another lever on top of those more foundational topics, which is a discussion for another time!
Thank you so much to both of you for being here! Please know how much I value your contributions in the report and beyond.
