It’s become more common than not these days to see tech companies step back from their diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.
The blows keep coming: E-commerce companies ThredUp and The RealReal now no longer report their employee demographics in annual reports filed to the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gazetteer SF has learned.
ThredUp, a fashion resale platform based in Oakland, released its annual financial report earlier this week, showing a departure from the DEI reporting practices it had established in previous filings with the SEC. While last year’s report detailed the demographics of the company’s workforce, showing 59% of employees identified as Black or Latinx, the most recent report omits representation data. Instead, the report simply states that the company is “proud to maintain a workforce that is majority female and underrepresented minorities.”
The changes were more egregious in San Francisco-based The RealReal’s annual report, released last week. In addition to no longer reporting employee demographic data, The RealReal scrapped its entire “Diversity and Inclusion” section. In last year’s report, that section outlined elements like an overall DEI vision, a four-pillar strategy to design an equitable future, and information about the company’s employee resource groups that help to “advance inclusion and belonging.”
Neither ThredUp nor The RealReal responded to Gazetteer’s request for comment.
ThredUp and The RealReal join a who’s who of tech heavies that have turned their backs on DEI. Uber, Airbnb, and Salesforce also recently scrapped DEI language in their respective annual reports. Twilio and Samsara, meanwhile, recently obscured mentions of DEI on their websites.
This is all, of course, thanks to the Trump administration’s assault on DEI. Ahead of President Trump’s election, he spoke openly about his disdain for DEI, prompting companies like Meta to gut its major DEI programs. At the time, Meta human resources executive Janelle Gale said in a memo to employees that DEI as a term had “become charged.” She also cited the changing “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts.”
Trump’s war on DEI has also, unsurprisingly, affected federal agencies in San Francisco. The Presidio Trust, for example, recently changed its gender-inclusive restroom signage at Presidio Tunnel Tops and directed employees to stop using gender pronouns in email signatures.
If you work in tech and want to chat about your experience, reach out at megan@gazetteer.co or securely via Signal at 415-516-5243.
