Beth Kowitt: DEI isn't dead. But it's not really alive, either

Reports of the death of DEI in corporate America have been greatly exaggerated.

Or at least that's what a new study from Catalyst and New York University's School of Law's Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging suggests. In the survey of 2,000 employees and leaders of big and medium-sized U.S. organizations, 80% said their companies are still committed to DEI's principles, and that they act on that commitment.

Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts might look different than they used to, and managers might be talking about them in a new way, if they're talking about them at all. (1) But they're still there - even if companies have abandoned the now taboo three-letter acronym.

This shouldn't really come as a huge surprise. Of course companies were going to maintain DEI in some form, because DEI is not a political project, as critics have claimed; it is a talent strategy at its core. As one executive recruiter has put it to me, it's a mathematical fact that, in a diverse society, if your company is comprised of people with identical backgrounds and perspectives, "you do not have the best talent in the jobs."

It's worth asking then if DEI does live on, even in an altered state, why some of the headwinds facing women and minorities in corporate America seem to be intensifying to such a high degree. The unemployment rate for Black workers last year outpaced levels for the rest of the population. And for Black women, the trend line was even worse, with their employment rate suffering one of its steepest declines in the last 25 years.

The Catalyst/NYU study indicates that the answer is not as simple as pointing a finger solely at the retreat from DEI alone. The bigger shift may be the rollback of the workplace initiatives that had started to make corporate America a more accessible place to workers who didn't look or act like the status quo. Bosses, now in their command-and-control era, are clamping down on remote work, flexibility and benefits as they reclaim their power in the post-pandemic world. Those policies are the very ones that made it possible for a larger cross section of workers to advance - a point that companies, which seem to still care about diversity, are now either ignoring or conveniently forgetting.

There's evidence that flexible workplace policies have done more in some cases to diversify corporate America than many formal DEI programs. Research from professors of sociology Alexandra Kalev at Tel Aviv University and Frank Dobbin at Harvard University found that corporate programs supporting work-life balance are more successful at promoting diversity among managers than the most popular racial equity initiatives. When companies had universal policies for family leave, flexible scheduling and childcare, their research showed that the percentage of people of color in manager roles increased, as did the percentage of white female managers. For example, they found that the adoption of a flextime policy produced significant changes in the percentage of management jobs held by white women (4.7%), Black men (4.5%), Black women (4.9%), Hispanic men (10.8%), Hispanic women (3.5%), Asian men (6.6%) and Asian women (9.1%).

The reason they gave was simple: "Because they face the greatest work/life challenges." The researchers noted that women and people of color are more likely to be single parents and that people of color on average have fewer financial resources.

Despite pressures from the Trump administration and anti-woke activist groups, Jason Schwartz, co-chair of the labor and employment and practice group at law firm Gibson Dunn, told me that companies have kept up their diversity work because they "do not want to go back to what the workplace looked like in the 1950s, Mad Men style" - an era when the C-suite was dominated by white men and women were relegated to support roles.

And yet, as Kalev and Dobbin write in Harvard Business Review, plenty of companies' feelings about work-life balance have barely shifted since then:

Sure, big companies today list generous work/life benefits on their websites and during recent hiring sprees may even have expanded the support they offer. But those same companies signal in countless ways that their ideal worker is somebody unencumbered by family obligations who can adhere to the kind of demanding daily schedules and career trajectories that were standard for white-collar white men 70 years ago.

Many employers have shown they would rather regress now that a weakened job market has given them cover. The percentage of U.S. employers providing paid leave to care for immediate family dropped two percentage points last year, according to a survey by the Society for Human Resource Management. Others, like Deloitte and Zoom, have made headlines for scaling back the amount of family leave they offer. (Deloitte is also cutting vacation days and axing fertility benefits for certain employees.) A growing list of employers are calling workers back to the office five days a week.

The people at the top may have thought of these as nice-to-have "perks," but to women and people of color they were much-needed changes that allowed them to enter and succeed in the workplace. If companies really do want a modern and diverse workforce, they should stop thinking they can shoehorn their employees into an outdated and stale way of working. Corporate America may not have completely abandoned the values and ideals of DEI. But it is abandoning the infrastructure and systems that made it work.

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(1) Despite 34% of employees reporting that their organization had decreased its inclusion efforts, the report found that 55% said their organization had publicly announced a shift away from these efforts.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Beth Kowitt is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering corporate America. She was previously a senior writer and editor at Fortune Magazine.

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This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 1:37 AM.