More than 200 S&P 500 companies scrubbed 'diversity' and 'equity' from annual reports in 2025
These new counts provided by Freshfields reinforce a widening corporate retreat from DEI this year after scrutiny of diversity policies intensified in Washington, D.C.
On his first day in office, President Trump signed an executive order ending federal DEI programs and ordering US agencies to "combat illegal private sector DEI actions."
Some big companies, including Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL), Meta (META), McDonald's (MCD), Amazon (AMZN), JPMorgan (JPM), Target (TGT), and Tractor Supply (TSCO), have proactively announced about-faces on their diversity policies.
Tractor Supply CEO Hal Lawton told Yahoo Finance last month that the company's goal in changing its DEI policies was to "remove" itself "from any sort of discourse that people viewed to be political or social in its orientation."
Many are also swapping out words such as 'diversity" and "equity' from their annual reports and instead using terms like inclusion, belonging, and meritocratic workplace.
"We're observing a shift in language," ISS-Corporate executive director Kosmas Papadoupoulos said.
Bank of America (BAC) and BlackRock (BLK) were among the firms on Wall Street that made such changes.
Bank of America removed all eight references to "diversity and inclusion" in its report filed in February, compared with its filing the year before.
In several places, the nation's second-largest bank replaced "diversity" with "opportunity," including renaming the diversity and inclusion group within its human resources department the opportunity and inclusion group.
BlackRock, the world's largest money manager, also removed four references to "diversity" in its latest annual report, including replacing a section titled "diversity, equity and inclusion" with one called "connectivity and inclusivity."
JPMorgan Chase has also dropped almost all mentions of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" from its annual report and rebranded its diversity programs to "opportunity" initiatives.
What's not happening so far in 2025 is any shareholder support for DEI changes of any type, for or against.
None of this season's investor-led DEI-focused proposals that went to a vote received majority shareholder approval, though the percentage of "anti-DEI" filings compared to "pro-DEI" filings has jumped in recent years.
Support across DEI proposals for S&P 500 firms hovered between 0.1% to 43.9%, Freshfields found, with support for proposals opposed to DEI below 2%.
Freshfields and other firms that track the measures identify anti-DEI measures as those that are skeptical of the initiatives and have an end goal to curtail or eliminate them. Pro-DEI proposals, on the other hand, are considered those that preserve or enhance a company's focus on the initiatives.
This year, 57 S&P 500 companies faced 65 DEI-related measures, 26 of which were anti-DEI measures.
Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy nonprofit that promotes environmental and social justice issues, called this year's DEI campaigns "triumphant" based on shareholders' rejection of anti-DEI measures.
That included defeats for anti-DEI measures proposed at major US companies like Apple (AAPL), Goldman Sachs (GS), Costco (COST), Levi Strauss (LEVI), Deere (DE), Berkshire Hathaway (BRK-B), and Disney (DIS).
Softer language added to corporate filings may help avoid the ire of Trump's executive orders, Behar said, but additional factors are influencing DEI, such as the SEC's updated guidance in February that makes it easier for companies to exclude shareholder proposals, particularly those related to social issues.
Prior guidelines required the SEC to consider a proposal's "broad societal impact" when reviewing a company's "no-action requests" that can keep proposals off their voting agendas.
New guidance instead says the SEC can consider a company's particular facts and circumstances.
On top of that, there's a lot of uncertainty for companies that are federal contractors, Behar said, after the US Supreme Court ruled that federal district courts lack authority to issue nationwide injunctions.
A district court in Maryland issued an order enjoining Trump's DEI executive order, but the Fourth Circuit appellate court ruled that the order could stand but applies only to contractors' DEI programs that violate federal antidiscrimination laws.
"As of Friday, now ... nobody knows what to do," Behar said.
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