In 2020, American businesses responded to an unprecedented wave of racial justice protests with an equally unprecedented surge in corporate commitments. Even as President Donald Trump was calling protesters “terrorists,” companies in industries across the U.S. pledged donations, launched diversity initiatives and issued statements in support of equity and inclusion.
As social scientists who study corporate political behavior, we, like many others, wondered whether this wave of corporate statements signaled a true commitment to racial justice or whether it was just symbolic. Some skeptics suggested that corporate statements about racial justice were just window dressing. Still others worried that corporations were becoming “woke” and distracted from making profits.
These concerns have taken on new meaning as the attack on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, has become a cornerstone of the new administration. When Donald Trump returned to office, two of his first acts were to ban DEI in federal government employment and overturning 60 years of affirmative action mandates on firms that do business with the government.
This made us wonder: Were the DEI efforts of recent years actually associated with greater corporate commitments to racial justice? Or was it just more political theater?
To try to better understand what was happening in corporate America, we collected every racial justice statement made by a Fortune 500 firm in response to the 2020 murder of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter protests.
We found that most firms stayed silent, while others made only weak symbolic responses. Just 1 in 5 made strong commitments, pledging resources and structural changes to their business practices, such as revamping hiring policies or funding racial justice organizations.
For that 20%, however, commitments could be substantial.
Take Microsoft, for example. Just 10 days after Floyd’s murder, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sent an internal memo condemning police brutality and urging employees to take action. He also announced that Microsoft would donate $1.5 million to racial justice organizations. Microsoft then pledged to invest US$150 million in diversity and inclusion efforts and to establish a $50 million fund to support Black-owned business partners. Microsoft also committed to doubling its Black-owned suppliers by 2023 and Black senior executives by 2025.
The impact of the DEI professional network
DEI professionals help companies manage the diversity of their workforces by promoting fairness in treatment and social inclusion. Their basic job is to ensure that workplaces are respectful to all employees. The rise of this job title signals a managerial shift from tolerating cultural diversity to promoting broad inclusion. Some DEI practices – for example, diversity training focused on discrimination – can lead to backlash, research has shown. But inclusive practices, such as ensuring mentoring for everyone, simply tend to foster better workplaces.
This made us wonder what distinguished the minority of firms that made more robust commitments to racial justice from the others. Our hunch was that when firm leadership discussed how to react to the Black Lives Matter protests, companies that already had DEI professionals with influential voices took stronger action.
To test our hypothesis, we first searched globally for all DEI job titles in all large firms in LinkedIn. LinkedIn profiles provide the most recent 10 jobs a person holds, so we can identify when and at what firm people had DEI jobs. LinkedIn has proven to be a reliable source of career data for corporate professionals and is especially appropriate for a new and growing job title such as DEI.
The general picture is clear.
There was a rapid rise in DEI positions in the U.S., with a big jump in 2020, followed by declines in 2022, when our data ends. Among Fortune 500 companies, however, only about half had any DEI professionals. DEI roles were growing rapidly, but they were far from universal in the largest corporations.
We also discovered that there was a set of firms central to the global DEI professional network. These firms were a source of future DEI staff for other companies. We measured centrality within the DEI network as the number of people in a firm’s DEI workforce that once worked in other prominent firms in the DEI network. Network centrality is a common way social scientists measure influence in groups.
To be clear, these weren’t companies that specialize in DEI, but rather had hired DEI staff to help run their core business. The most central firms to the DEI professional network included some of the country’s largest banks, consulting firms and corporations, such as IBM, Johnson & Johnson and General Electric. These firms are also more likely to have made longer and larger investments in DEI staff than other firms.
Based on prior studies of influence in social networks, we suspected that when a firm’s DEI staff were recruited from these prominent firms in the DEI network, they would have more influence over corporate decisions on how to respond to the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. We found that the 20% of firms that made strong racial justice comments had much more prominent DEI staff than those that remained silent or made only symbolic statements. This finding has held up in multiple statistical models, where we have controlled for other factors that might be of relevance to making strong racial justice commitments.
DEI staff, it appears, were influential when the national conversation turned to racial justice. Conversely, we also found that firms with politically conservative CEOs were much more likely to remain silent in the face of Black Lives Matter protests.
The future of DEI?
We wondered whether the association of DEI professionals and stronger racial justice commitments was stable, or perhaps just a fleeting result of strong mass protest in 2020. So we examined a second instance of corporations taking a stance. In 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court was considering the constitutional status of affirmative action practices in college admissions. Before the Supreme Court made its ruling, many firms sought to weigh in to influence the result by submitting legal briefs documenting the reasons why they thought the court should rule in favor of affirmative action.
We found the same kinds of patterns of corporate support for affirmative action in 2022 as we did from the earlier protests in 2020. A total of 46 firms in the Fortune 500 publicly supported affirmative action. Once again, there is a strong relationship between the prominence of DEI professionals and taking action on racial justice policy. Those firms with greater prominence in the DEI network in 2020 were significantly more likely to sign onto a friend-of-the-court briefing in 2022.
When firms make stronger investments in DEI work, and their DEI professionals are more central to the national DEI network, those DEI professionals were more influential in producing stronger racial justice commitments. This reflects long-term firm investments and the development of a robust, influential DEI staff.
But only 20% of firms made strong commitments, while the vast majority were pretty silent in the face of national calls for racial justice. DEI roles had begun to drop after 2021, even before Trump’s election, and the current political attack on DEI will be chilling. There was already evidence in 2023 that some major firms were hiring fewer minority employees across their workforces. The influence of DEI professionals was never widespread and is likely now in decline. But we suspect that this decline will be fastest among the firms that were never really committed to racial justice and have particularly conservative CEOs.
What about responses to the new political environment? As of March 2025, only 31 of the Fortune 500 signaled that they planned to roll back their DEI efforts or eliminate them altogether. Eleven firms publicly defended their DEI efforts, nine of which were among the strong racial justice responders in 2020. None of the firms that were silent in 2020 have defended DEI so far this year.
So far among the Fortune 500, 92% of firms have remained largely silent about their DEI intentions. Perhaps the most interesting are Amazon, Meta, Google, Target, Ford and Walmart – all firms that made strong racial justice pledges in 2020 but have joined the DEI backlash this year. However, other firms have resisted these trends. The future of equal opportunity in U.S. employment will likely depend, at least in part, on how these silences and defenses are worked out in firms’ internal human resource practices and public commitments.
This research was supported by the Center for Employment Equity at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation..
Jorge Quesada Velazco and Kevin L. Young do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
