What's the Matter with DEI? A Conversation
A conversation with Joanne Bauer and Elli Siapkidou of Rights CoLab on the messy state of DEI, and how to move forward with a more constructive approach
A few weeks ago, I had a fascinating and timely conversation with co-founder of Rights CoLab, Joanne Bauer, and ethics consultant Elli Siapkidou, PhD, who have been giving deep thought to the state of play in DEI, what went wrong, and what to do about it. We spoke in depth about their brilliant new report, What’s the Matter with DEI? A Reset. It provides a clear roadmap for companies who still wish to draw from the widest possible talent pool and create an inclusive and healthy culture, but are (understandably) struggling to adapt to a polarized and political landscape.
There is surely no better time to release a publication that takes a clear view of a field that has become a mess of acronyms and country-specific criteria. Joanne and Elli have developed a very clear view of how we got here, what to do about it, and where we need to go next. I learnt so much from this conversation!
Note: This conversation was originally recorded on video. It has been lightly edited and condensed. I would love to know what you think of this format!
Alison Taylor: Good afternoon, Joanne and Elli, and welcome. I have really been looking forward to this conversation, which is about exploring your new report on the current status and challenges of DEI and what to do next. So the first question I have is, tell us about the background and scope of this project and your key findings.
Joanne Bauer: Alison, thank you so much for having us here. I wanted to start actually congratulating you on something you recently posted on LinkedIn about the Forbes conversation you had with Nell Derick Debevoise Dewey. We agree with you that the institutions and the initiatives that have enabled the business case have really sort of collapsed, and that we need to reinvent new forms of accountability and get back to a basic sense of morality. This is very relevant to what we want to talk about today.
The project does have a bit of a background. My two cofounders of Rights CoLab and I saw a real advantage in being more experimental in figuring out solutions to pressing human rights challenges. We started with the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board and said, if we could get human rights into these standards, that would be a really significant thing—imagine freedom of association and collective bargaining widely agreed as financially material.
This was a hard sell, but then 2020 hit, and the largest corporations were falling all over themselves to prove that they were more responsible than other companies. And our effort to actually integrate human rights into sustainability standards suddenly became possible. SASB engaged us to work on diversity, equity, inclusion. Why?
Because investors were determined it was financially material, absolutely financially material. And they said: We must have better DEI standards. So first we did a project on standards, but then when Trump got re-elected, I said we have GOT to do something about this, and Elli felt the same way, and here we are. This new report covers 35 frameworks, and I believe it’s 749 now metrics that are in use on DEI, that we manage to synthesize into a roadmap of what needs to actually happen within companies, struggling with all these frameworks during this very messy time.
Alison Taylor: Okay, so follow up question. So, at a high level, your agenda is to advance human rights globally, and there was energy from 2020 to 2022 around the first report, where the implicit argument was that there’s the strongest or most compelling business case for DEI through the lens of maximizing human capital. You gathered all that data, then you saw coming from a million miles off, because who could have missed it, this kind of chilling effect going on on DEI. So now your goal is to really show why this is perverse and unhelpful, and to gather the evidence about what we need to do next?
Joanne Bauer: Yes, that’s exactly right.
Elli Siapkidou, PhD: And I think that it wasn’t as clear as that when we started. As we found our footing in real time, this new report became a blueprint for the way out for companies who are completely lost, or completely threatened, or completely destabilized by the political environment, especially in the US. And that wasn’t quite as straightforward back then as it might sound now.
Alison Taylor: And this leads into my next question, which is about what your latest report actually found. And I’m going to ask you about both the EU and the US.
And I will just tell you in that dark period, where I don’t think I’ve been so depressed in years as in February 2025, when the scale of what was going to happen unfolded—I was pretty confident initially that there would be pushback from the EU, that the EU would hold the line, that we would see a countervailing force from the EU. I thought actually I’d be doing more work in the EU. We can also talk about how DEI has a slightly different profile in the US versus the EU because of the specific history of both geographies.
But one of the things that I think has been most disappointing and concerning for me, whether we’re talking about DEI, or human rights, or sustainability writ large, is that the context and discourse in the US seems to have somewhat affected, or infected, the discussion in the EU. So curious about your reactions there. But can you talk to us about what the headline findings are for how this topic, and the treatment of it, has evolved in both geographies?
Joanne Bauer: The headline is that DEI hasn’t so much collapsed as it’s splintered. And so I would say, when we were in the Business Roundtable era, and with everything that was happening in 2019, 2020, 2021, until we started to get the ESG and DEI backlashes, that this field had really moved, DEI had generated broad corporate commitment, and it was building. And, it had been building since much earlier than 2020.
Only recently did we start to call it something like DEI, maybe within the last decade. And when #MeToo and the Black Lives Matter movements exploded, this led to rising interest and even pressure to demonstrate this commitment. And in a matter of months, this moved into something much more contested, risk-managed, and often rebranded. In Europe, at least, DEI is more anchored in law, and in regulatory frameworks, and things like transparency requirements, and the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, although certainly we’ve seen some chipping away at that.
I do think what we’re seeing a transatlantic fragmentation of the landscape, where companies are really trying to preserve this core talent management function while avoiding the politically charged DEI language.
In the US, I want to be really clear that the shift has not just been about rebranding; there’s certainly an absolute avoidance of talking about DEI, but it’s also a real rollback.
There are a number of concrete examples that are tracked in the media: IBM shifted its supplier diversity goals away from race and gender. Gannett said it wasn’t going to publish diversity data anymore. Victoria’s Secret halted its goal to increase Black representation. AT&T and other companies pulled back on participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
And then of course, there’s Target, which is probably the most visible case. Everybody knows it moved so quickly, literally the day or two after the executive order, to end all of its major DEI initiatives, including its three-year diversity goals. And then there was this big consumer backlash. Store visits fell, I think by about 4%. And the stock price declined. It was a contributing factor, though of course not the entire story, behind Target’s stock price decline.
So in terms of what’s driving it, of course the Trump administration was a major accelerator, but that wasn’t the sole cause. You’ll remember this year’s State of the Union where Trump mentioned that “We ended DEI in America” to huge applause on the Republican side. But, the backlash had already been building for several years. It was building at the moment we released our first report in August 2022. Another key moment was the Supreme Court decision on students for fair admissions versus Harvard, which came in 2023, and struck a major blow against affirmative action. And then alongside that, you have these anti-DEI laws in the States and broader anti-ESG campaigning. So what changed in 2025 is that this became a much more coordinated push at the federal level.
You’ve got executive orders, the contract ultimatums to companies, reinterpretations of civil rights law, and all of this reframing DEI as discriminatory. That huge applause that Trump got from Republicans is reflective of the fact that this idea was really resonating across a significant portion of the public, because it taps into this broader narrative that had been pushed by people like Tucker Carlson and Robbie Starbuck around this notion of reverse discrimination and white grievance. And so we’re just in a whole new territory, and this really raised the legal and reputational risks for companies.
Alison Taylor: So just for a clarifying point, because I don’t know that this is clear for everyone, the law hasn’t actually changed. The frame of DEI historically in the US has been around ‘protected classes.’ So certain social identities have certain legal protections.
That actually hasn’t changed. But now that notion of protected classes is being weaponized. So you have a number of lawsuits, for example, from white people saying they were being discriminated against for being white in specific companies.
So I think this is misunderstood. And so just to kind of ask a little bit more about that, and how that maybe differs from the EU as well.
Joanne Bauer: Yeah, thank you for clarifying that. It’s absolutely true. And one of the most infuriating things, if you read the executive order, is how it’s crafted in this way that it does reflect the core of anti-discrimination that’s in the Civil Rights Act, but again, weaponizes it against people who have been historically marginalized and so forth.
And so, now the Equal Opportunity Office in the United States has a big poster that it’s put out that every employer is supposed to put up on their wall and that what to do if you’re facing discrimination due to DEI. It flips on its head everything that the Civil Rights Act was intended to be.
The civil rights community has been fighting, and their lawyers are very, very, very clear about this. PolicyLink, which is an organization that I think is doing outstanding work, and especially during this time, does these ‘just and fair’ business briefings every month or every few weeks or so. And they’ve brought on lawyers who have been very clear that nothing has changed, and that as lawyers, we need to be emboldened on these points.
All of this has had, and continues to have, ripple effects well beyond Washington, as we can see by the behavior of American firms. It has emboldened critics, it has encouraged companies to retreat or rebrand. And it’s helped to normalize this idea that DEI is politically risky rather than strategically necessary.
Our report is called What’s the Matter with DEI?, which was meant to be sort of a triple entendre, if there’s such a thing. So it’s like, what’s wrong with DEI, and then sort of what’s so bad about DEI, sort of like kind of the reverse nuance.
And then the matter is kind of like, what is the content of DEI? What’s the matter with DEI?
