Diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in tech peaked long ago, and are now at risk of fully evaporating. The worst case scenario, amid both Amazon and Meta respectively scaling back and scrapping their explicit DEI efforts, is that other tech companies follow suit, seeing this as an opportunity to stop doing something they never wanted to do in the first place.
President-elect Donald Trump has spoken openly about his disdain for DEI, and ally Texas senator Ted Cruz recently said he expects the federal government to “unwind the woke policies of the last four years.” Ahead of Trump’s second presidency, Amazon and Meta’s decisions around DEI signal they’re in the game of appeasing Trump.
In December, Amazon notified employees it would wind down “outdated programs and materials” and focus “on programs with proven outcomes” while still fostering “a more truly inclusive culture,” Bloomberg reported. Amazon, however, has not detailed what programs the company will implement.
Meta, meanwhile, is gutting its major DEI programs, according to an employee memo leaked to Axios. The memo claimed the company remains committed to recruiting job candidates from different backgrounds, and building programs “that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.”
The memo, written by Meta’s vice president of human resources Janelle Gale, cited the changing “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts” in the U.S. and a recent Supreme Court decision “signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI.” She also said DEI as a term has “become charged.”
The backlash has been swift. Mark Lemley, an attorney and law professor at Stanford Law School, announced this week he’s dropped Meta as a client in an ongoing AI copyright lawsuit. In an email to Gazetteer SF, Lemley cited several factors, including the company’s decision to get rid of its DEI programs, its move to eliminate third-party fact-checking, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s recent comments about how corporations should embrace their “masculine energy,” which Lemley said “encourage a culture of toxic masculinity.”
“I decided that I could not in good conscience be associated with a company that made those decisions, so I decided to withdraw,” he wrote.
One Meta worker, who spoke to Gazetteer on the condition of anonymity for fear of repercussions, said they were more disappointed than surprised by the company’s decision to gut DEI programs. It’s “had an immediate impact on our experience,” the Meta worker said, adding “that impact will have a ripple effect for years to come.”
It’s not surprising for a major tech company like Meta to signal that DEI is not important, but it’s certainly disappointing. Meta, Amazon, and other major tech players were resistant to DEI work in the early days; indeed, Amazon only started playing ball after years of pressure from civil rights groups and the media.
In 2011, CNN looked into workforce demographic data in the tech industry. Meta and Amazon were among the 20 technology companies that declined to disclose the racial and gender breakdowns of their respective workforces.
Meta didn’t release demographic information until its first diversity report in June 2014, about a month after Alphabet, which was the first major tech company to release such a report. Meta released its last one in 2024, covering its 2023 workforce. When asked by Gazetteer about future demographic disclosures, Meta spokesperson Tracy Clayton was cagey. “TBD all depends on the legal & policy landscape,” he wrote in an email.
Amazon, too, remains quiet on whether it will release demographic data in the future. It was one of the last tech companies to release demographic data, waiting until Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others had already reported their gender and racial breakdowns. Amazon finally released a report in October 2014, following pressure from Rev. Jesse Jackson the month prior. Like Meta, Amazon’s most recent report covers its 2023 workforce.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser did not answer Gazetteer’s question about whether the company would release diversity reports in the future, instead pointing us to Amazon’s page explaining its positions on issues like DEI and immigration reform. This page also did not answer our question.
Annual diversity reports confirmed what everyone had been thinking — that tech was predominantly white and male. Those reports set the stage for several years of slow but steady progress in the space. Companies started setting actual representation goals and began to examine demographics on engineering and leadership teams, created heads of diversity roles (jury’s still out on whether those were effective), hosted mandatory unconscious bias training for employees in the name of fostering inclusion, and more.
Some slight progress has been made over the decade of public diversity numbers: Meta has seen slight increases in the proportion of Black and Hispanic employees, as well as the percentage of women employees, which increased from approximately 31% to 36% between 2014 and 2023. The proportion of white workers has fallen from roughly 57% to 37%, largely due to an increase in the percentage of Asian employees.
But the numbers are still not great: About 6% of Meta’s employees were Hispanic in 2023, up from 4% in 2014. And the percentage of Black employees went from 2% to about 4%. Without the public release of this information, it’s likely even less will change.
DEI efforts have been in slow decline for years, despite a brief moment of public-facing sympathy after the 2020 police killing of George Floyd. In 2023, for example, Meta and Google both made cuts to certain DEI programs. At the time, a Meta spokesperson told CNBC, “our commitment to DEI remains at the center of who we are as a company.” Ah, how things change.
Joelle Emerson, co-founder and CEO at Paradigm, a diversity consulting firm for companies like Airbnb, GrubHub, and Etsy, told Gazetteer that she interprets these recent announcements as companies saying they will simply stop being performative. She hopes they will continue to do meaningful work on diversity, even if it comes without the DEI label that prompts so much ire from conservatives.
“It’s too soon to say what is actually going to happen,” she said.
But she is “a little nervous about how other companies will interpret the announcements and what will be the ripple effect,” she said. Her fear is that other companies take Amazon’s and Meta’s decisions as permission to say, “Oh, we should no longer care about women in the workplace” or to scrap a parental leave policy they were considering. That’s “the biggest risk,” she told Gazetteer.
Do you work in tech? You can contact Megan Rose Dickey on Signal at 415-516-5243.
