Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Accenture has scrapped its global diversity and inclusion goals after an “evaluation” of the US political landscape, becoming the latest big company to ditch its targets since the election of Donald Trump.
A memo to staff from chief executive Julie Sweet said the New York-listed consulting group would begin “sunsetting” its diversity goals set in 2017, as well as career development programmes for “people of specific demographic groups”.
Sweet said in the memo on Thursday that the change followed an “evaluation of our internal policies and practices and the evolving landscape in the United States, including recent Executive Orders with which we must comply”.
Accenture, which employs 799,000 people around the world, joins Meta, McDonald’s and Target in ditching diversity, equity and inclusion goals in response to the new political climate since Trump’s election.
The US president has been highly critical of what he calls the “absolute nonsense” of “discriminatory” DEI measures.
He signed a series of executive orders cutting federal DEI programmes when he came into office last month, tapping into a vein of corporate fatigue for diversity goals.
Other companies, such as Costco and JPMorgan Chase, have reaffirmed their commitment while some are reassessing their inclusion policies for the Trump era.
In 2017, Accenture set a target that half its staff would be women by the end of 2025. It also set a goal for 25 per cent of its managing directors to be women by 2020, a target it later updated to 30 per cent by 2025. At the time, 41 per cent of its employees and 21 per cent of managing directors were women.
The group also set itself goals for ethnic minority representation in its workforce in some countries such as the US and UK.
Sweet, who took the reins at Accenture in 2019, has previously been outspoken on diversity.
In an interview posted on Accenture’s YouTube channel in 2020, Sweet spoke of the importance of a diverse workplace. In the interview, she said that committing to diversity was the “right thing to do”, and that Accenture would hold leaders accountable for sticking to “clear goals”.
In a report published by the company that year and co-authored by Sweet, she was described as a “leader” on diversity and inclusion.
The report said: “Progress (on DEI) just isn’t fast enough. Why aren’t companies more diverse and inclusive, when the business case in favor of a culture of equality strengthens each year? And why is the share of women in leadership positions still so low?”
In this week’s memo rolling back the DEI targets, Sweet said they would no longer be used to measure staff performance, and she also announced a pause on submitting data to external diversity benchmarking surveys pending an evaluation.
The group would also “evaluate” other external partnerships on the topic “as part of refreshing our talent strategy”, she added.
“We are and always have been a meritocracy,” Sweet wrote in the memo, echoing Trump’s vow to discard DEI policies in favour of “a society . . . based on merit”.
The memo said the group’s diversity targets had been “largely achieved” and added that Accenture would build an “inclusive” workplace “free from bias” and with “equal opportunity”.
Accenture declined to comment.
