After layoffs, Meta, which used remote work during the pandemic to advance its diversity goals, now faces an uphill battle to continue making progress with DEI
Brit Levy, 35, was eager to join Meta's paid training program for aspiring human resources managers last year because she wanted … Tweets: @carnage4life , @pt , @kcraigtv , @nerdbitches , and @max111206 Tweets: Dare Obasanjo / @carnage4life : @pt This article is classic journalism of starting with a conclusion then matching anecdotes to that conclusion. Obviously can't say more than. Parker / @pt : I was told (mostly by people rationalizing their own life choices or talking their own book) that remote work was unmitigated upside and only dinosaurs would suggest otherwise. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/... Kenneth Craig / @kcraigtv : “The last-in-first-out has affected a wide swath of people, but because women and minorities were hired disproportionately in the last couple of years they have also been fired disproportionately.” - Bhaskar Chakravorti @FletcherSchool. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... Brit Levy / @nerdbitches : Companies can choose to end DEI programs, but cancelling programs halfway through causes extreme hardship. What Meta did was completely unnecessary. These employees were also not given severance, only the legally required WARN pay. #meta #layoffs https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @max111206 : Levy, who is Mexican American, agreed to start the 12-month gig in April after she checked with Meta that her position would be secure for the duration of the program despite the company's financial challenges. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Context & Ripple Effects
Meta's diversity push had a concrete engine: its 2022 diversity report credited remote work with helping recruit people of color across a workforce spread over multiple locations. The layoffs reported here cut against that mechanism directly — last-in-first-out selection hits the same recent hires that diversification produced, and the cancelled paid HR training program left enrollees like Brit Levy, who enrolled after being assured her position was secure, with only legally required WARN pay.
The episode fits an established pattern rather than standing alone: Meta had already disbanded its Responsible Innovation team while insisting the goals remained, and employee morale was deteriorating under Zuckerberg's efficiency drive. Two years on, the endpoint is explicit — Meta terminated its major DEI programs outright, citing a changed legal and policy landscape.
First-order effects
- Women and minorities hired disproportionately in recent years bear the brunt of last-in-first-out layoffs, reversing the composition gains the 2022 report documented.
- Participants in the cancelled 12-month HR training program, including Brit Levy, lose the promised role security and receive no severance beyond WARN pay.
Second-order effects
- The cuts compound the morale damage already attributed to the efficiency drive and absentee leadership, making retention of the diverse hires who remain harder precisely as the pipeline that produced them shuts down.
- Each dismantled structure — Responsible Innovation, then the training pipeline — normalizes the next retreat, lowering the internal cost of the eventual full termination of DEI hiring, training, and procurement programs.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, corporate DEI functions behave as cyclical spending rather than durable infrastructure: built during growth and cheap distributed hiring, cut first when efficiency mandates and legal pressure arrive — which is exactly how Meta's arc ended in 2025.
- Remote work's role as a recruiting equalizer gets decoupled from diversity outcomes once the programs that converted distributed hiring into representation are gone, leaving workforce composition exposed to whatever layoff logic dominates.
The trend: Corporate DEI programs are proving contingent on cost cycles and the legal climate, with Meta's path from remote-work-enabled recruiting to full program termination marking the shift from commitment to retreat.