After vocal commitments following George Floyd's murder in 2020, DEI programs at Big Tech companies, including Meta and Google, were in broad retreat in 2023
- After vocal commitments following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, DEI programs in the tech industry are in broad retreat.
Context & Ripple Effects
The retreat reverses a post-2020 period in which a survey found 37 tech giants had committed $3.8 billion to diversity efforts and roughly two-thirds changed DEI policies after the protests the industry’s post-2020 DEI spending and policy push. It also follows evidence that public pledges did not necessarily correspond to stronger Black representation the gap between public pledges and workforce outcomes.
For Meta and Google, this is an early signal that DEI was becoming less durable as a standalone corporate program than the commitments made in 2020 suggested. Later coverage of Meta ending major DEI work shows the retrenchment was not merely rhetorical Meta’s subsequent termination of hiring, training, and procurement programs.
First-order effects
- Meta and Google’s pullback reduces the institutional weight of DEI programs that had shaped internal policy, hiring-related efforts, training, and supplier-facing initiatives.
- Employees and candidates who relied on these programs face fewer formal channels for representation and accountability, while company leadership gains more discretion over how such work is organized.
Second-order effects
- Other large technology employers can treat the retreat by two major peers as cover to reassess DEI budgets, targets, and public commitments rather than maintain a common post-2020 standard.
- The emphasis shifts from visible, dedicated programs toward less easily comparable people-management practices, making external assessment of progress more difficult.
Third-order effects
- If this pattern persists, workforce inclusion becomes less of a distinct corporate institution and more contingent on leadership priorities, legal exposure, and the business cycle.
- The likely industry-level consequence is weaker shared disclosure and benchmarking: later reporting that some major firms would stop publishing diversity data points to that risk the move away from diversity-report publication.
The trend: Big Tech’s post-2020 diversity commitments are moving from highly visible, dedicated programs toward narrower and less publicly measurable forms of workforce policy.