MAGGIE PAGANO: Ford puts the brakes on diversity
Listen closely and you’ll hear the squealing brakes as the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (also known as DEI) movement is being slammed on in corporate America.
The latest company to clamp down on DEI is Ford Motor Company.
Earlier this week, the US automaker informed employees that after “revisiting” its DEI policies over the past year, the company had decided to discontinue most of them.
The change of heart came in an internal email to employees, in which Ford CEO Jim Farley told them the company would no longer participate in an annual survey by an LGBTQ advocacy group — the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index — even though the company had consistently received perfect scores.
In addition to ending quotas for minority dealers and suppliers, he wrote that Ford will also make changes to corporate sponsorships, which will anger some interesting rainbow-colored lobby groups.
Signing off: Ford is the latest company to raise the bar on diversity, equity and inclusion
Farley added: “We recognize that our employees and customers have differing beliefs.”
Yet just four years ago, following the 2020 killing of George Floyd, Ford was at the forefront of DEI, publicly declaring, “We’re not interested in superficial actions. This is our moment to lead the way and fully commit to creating the fair, just and inclusive culture our employees deserve.”
That’s why Ford’s decision to step back is such a big shift in motion. It’s one of the country’s oldest and most revered companies, with 177,000 employees in the U.S.
The fact that it is brave enough to challenge the current orthodoxy that is spreading like wildfire through companies and institutions says a lot about the changing zeitgeist.
But it’s not alone. A few days ago, Milwaukee-based Harley-Davidson announced on social media site X that it had discontinued all “DEI features” in April.
The historic motorcycle manufacturer is also withdrawing from the Human Rights Campaign’s score index and removing all “socially motivated content” from its employee training materials.
Harley-Davidson remains true to its roots and does not stand still.
The company has eliminated all hiring quotas and no longer has “supplier diversity spending goals.” Translated from DEI industry jargon, this means it has suspended goals for spending the company’s money on businesses led by people with diverse backgrounds.
An ND that gets to the heart of the matter, right? That’s what makes the whole DEI thing such a nonsense, and a dangerous nonsense at that, because what happens is that instead of uniting people, the movement ends up dividing them based on identities or characteristics. Or whatever other distinctions the DEI people can come up with.
Everyone is diverse. In fact, the word comes from the Latin diversus, which means diverse. It is also the reason the diversity movement is dying, because the concept simply does not make sense, neither economically, nor socially, nor culturally.
Ford and Harley-Davidson aren’t the only big companies to decline. They follow farm equipment maker John Deere & Co. and Tractor Supply, which also scrapped their diversity programs earlier this summer.
Others that have scrapped their programs include DIY chain Lowe’s and Brown-Forman, the Kentucky-based American beverage giant and maker of Jack Daniels whiskey.
So what has changed, and why now? One reason is the sheer impracticality of pursuing DEI policies, since they’re wrong. Another is the successful campaign of conservative activist Robby Starbuck, who has led the charge against DEI since a Supreme Court ruling earlier this year struck down affirmative action on American college campuses.
Starbuck, a former Hollywood music video director, has waged a one-man crusade—mostly on X, where he’s attracted half a million followers—against big business. His argument is simple enough: stay neutral and stay away from ideological issues.
Investors seem to agree. The stock prices of all the companies that have retreated from DEI have barely changed, confirming that their mad rush to become super trendy by embracing the DEI craze was just a mirage.
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