Rashad Robinson on the accountability gap between what companies say about diversity and what their payroll shows
Call it a vocabulary pivot. Walmart talks about “belonging.” Meta’s former chief diversity officer now oversees “accessibility and engagement.” Verizon, in documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission while seeking approval for a $20 billion merger, promised regulators its HR department “will no longer have a team or any individual roles focused on DEI.” Each of these companies issued statements affirming its continued commitment to inclusive culture. Each dismantled the infrastructure that had been producing it.
This is what Stanford researchers have named “DEI washing” — the systematic gap between what corporations say about diversity and what their hiring data shows. A study published in August 2025 by Stanford Graduate School of Business researchers analyzed DEI controversies at hundreds of U.S. public companies and found no statistical relationship between increases in DEI messaging and changes in actual workforce diversity. Companies that faced public backlash over diversity cuts didn’t change behavior. They changed vocabulary.
The Gap, Documented
The Stanford findings put empirical weight behind something Rashad Robinson, founder and President of Rashad Robinson Advisors, has argued consistently in his newsletters and public work: moral appeals to corporations don’t move the needle. Public pressure generates press releases. What it rarely generates is different hiring outcomes.
The data confirms it. Among companies that eliminated DEI programs after the 2024 election, a Resume.org survey found that six in ten reported hiring fewer underrepresented workers. Nearly a third say they’re promoting fewer of them. Employee morale dropped at close to half of these organizations. Retention declined at more than a third.
Meanwhile, DEI language in corporate earnings calls and proxy statements kept climbing — a pattern the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, summarizing the Stanford research, identified as characteristic of firms engaged in diversity washing: more words, unchanged outcomes.
The Rebranding Playbook
The language shift is more than semantic. By retiring the term “DEI” and replacing it with softer, less legally fraught alternatives, companies accomplish several things at once. They defuse pressure from political opponents who have made DEI a rhetorical target. They preserve the appearance of commitment for investors and customers who still value it. And they free themselves from the accountability structures — diversity hiring targets, reporting obligations, dedicated staff — that gave the original programs their force.
The people who built and staffed those programs absorbed the cost directly. NPR reporting found that more than 2,600 DEI roles have been eliminated since early 2023, roughly 13% of positions that existed at the peak. Chief diversity officers are leaving or being laid off and not replaced. Candace Byrdsong Williams, a diversity executive with 18 years of experience, spent nine months searching for a new position after being laid off in 2024. “I just didn’t think it would take this long,” she told NPR. The roles aren’t being restructured. They’re disappearing.
What makes this particularly hard to challenge is that companies are not claiming they’ve abandoned diversity. They’re claiming the opposite. The gap between the claim and the outcome is precisely what the Stanford researchers documented — and precisely what Robinson has been pressing organizations to reckon with.
What Actually Moves the Needle
Robinson’s argument isn’t that corporations are uniquely malicious. It’s that they are institutionally responsive to incentives and to financial consequences, more reliably than to moral ones. When there’s no cost to saying one thing and doing another, companies do exactly that. The Stanford findings confirm the pattern.
His answer is to impose the cost. Consumer campaigns that hit revenue. Investor pressure that hits stock price. Employee organizing that hits retention and recruitment. The research offers some evidence this framing is correct: companies that made substantive diversity improvements following controversies avoided the stock-price penalties that followed companies that didn’t. The market, in those cases, could tell the difference between genuine change and a vocabulary update.
The ESG rating system, meanwhile, has worked against accountability. The Stanford study found that diversity-washing firms actually obtained superior ESG scores and attracted more institutional investment — despite being more likely to incur discrimination violations. Firms that talked about diversity more than their actual workforce demographics warranted were rewarded, not penalized. The signal was broken.
Robinson’s approach is to fix the signal. Private appeals to corporate conscience haven’t worked — the Stanford data makes that plain. The alternative is economic accountability applied consistently enough that DEI washing stops being a viable posture and starts being an expensive one. The research has named what corporations are doing. The harder problem is building the organized pressure required to make them stop.
