By Angela Palumbo and Molly Cook Escobar

As their businesses pulled back on diversity initiatives, a handful of tech executives decried the consequences of diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, or DEI. Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that corporate culture had been "neutered." Multiple tech companies, including Meta, removed diversity data from their annual disclosures.

DEI gained attention among tech companies roughly a decade ago. That's when many of the firms started publishing annual reports on efforts to hire people from a broad range of backgrounds, including different races, genders and sexual orientations, while touting fair treatment for all groups across the workplace.

To understand the impact, Barron's analyzed proxy statements from the 30 largest tech companies in the S&P 500 and compared them with the same filings from a decade ago.

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In its 2014 diversity report, Facebook wrote that the numbers showed "we have more work to do -- a lot more." Apple CEO Tim Cook wrote in his company's 2014 diversity report that he was "not satisfied with the numbers on this page."

Those now endangered diversity efforts leave behind a legacy of muted success. Female representation within tech company executive suites has roughly doubled in the past decade.

"It is gratifying to see that we have made progress in this area, and I do not think that progress would have been achieved without numerous interventions to surface the issues and to support women," Verna Myers, CEO of The Verna Myers Company and former vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix, told Barron's.

Still, the senior ranks at the largest tech companies remain more than 80% male, according to corporate filings.

Barron's analyzed the named executive officers, or NEOs, from the most recent proxy filings at the 30 companies to track gender diversity. These executives are generally the most highly compensated executives at a company.

Apple and Nvidia have two female named executives, while Amazon, Tesla, and Netflix have none. AMD has three female executives, including its CEO, the most of any in the group.

"If organizations aren't held accountable, and if there is no continued tracking and monitoring of that data, I think there'd simply be a rollback, or trickle back, to where we were previously," Chartise Clark, managing director at executive search and consulting firm Stanton Chase, told Barron's.

Of the 153 executives named in the most recent proxies, 30 were women. That's 19.6%. In 2014, 11 out of 143 named executives were female, or 8%.

Experts say scrapping DEI initiatives could slow this modest progress that women have made within the upper reaches of public tech companies.

One day after his Jan. 20 inauguration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order titled "Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity." It called for the encouragement of the private sector to "end illegal DEI discrimination and preferences."

Some tech companies have since removed references to DEI from their filings, while others have reworded their statements.

Some one-third of the top 30 tech companies have removed any mention of diversity from their most recent annual filings.

Most of the changes to diversity policy are happening under the radar, and companies aren't eager to talk about them. Barron's reached out to all 30 companies mentioned in this article; 23 didn't respond to questions. Accenture, Meta, Nvidia, Arista, Microsoft, and Netflix declined to comment beyond their public filings. A Salesforce spokesperson said, "while we don't have representation goals, we remain committed to our longstanding core value of equality -- equal opportunities, equal pay for equal work, and the dignity of every person."

"The executive order has played a role, and companies are really trying to figure out, 'can I legally do this?," says Serena Huang, author of The Inclusion Equation: Leveraging Data & AI For Organizational Diversity and Wellbeing. "Is it against the executive orders to have these statements?'"

In its annual report filed in January 2024, ServiceNow included a section titled "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion." The company stated "we believe that employees with diverse backgrounds and experiences who are comfortable expressing their points of view in the workplace will work together to create better products and services that will appeal to a wider customer base and ultimately result in more business for ServiceNow."

A year later, the section has been relabeled, "Culture and Inclusion." It states: "We live our culture by regularly listening to our people and gathering feedback directly from our workforce to inform our programs and meet employee needs globally."

Other companies have chosen to altogether scrap their internal representation goals. In its latest annual report, Meta Platforms said that it ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities, as having goals "can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender."

Accenture, one of the few S&P 500 tech firms with a female CEO, is also making changes to its diversity reports. An internal company memo from CEO Julie Sweet viewed by Barron's said the firm was "sunsetting our global employee representation goals set in 2017 and updated in 2020 (which we have largely achieved)...while putting a greater focus on inclusion and a sense of belonging for all."

Methodology:

Barron's analyzed the 30 largest technology companies in the S&P 500 by market value. (Telecommunications firms, which don't match tech's growth profile, were excluded from the analysis.)

Named executive officers (NEOs) are those listed in the company's annual proxy statements. They group generally consists of a company's CEO, CFO, and remaining highest paid executives at the company. Barron's collected the NEO data from the most recent proxy filings and compared them with data from the companies' 2014 proxies. Palantir, Uber and Arista Networks weren't public in 2014, and are therefore not included in the 2014 NEO counts.

Barron's also examined each company's most recent annual filings for any mention of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Write to Angela Palumbo at angela.palumbo@dowjones.com and Molly Cook Escobar at molly.cookescobar@barrons.com

This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.

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April 08, 2025 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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