Senior figures in British business have described a chilling effect on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, saying they are being “rebranded” to avoid attracting unwanted political attention.
Five years afterthe murder of George Floydin the US shone a spotlight on racial inequality, efforts to create a level playing field in the workplace are facing a rightwing backlash on both sides of the Atlantic.
But experts say many organisations are resisting the attacks by reframing policies previously known as DEI in the US, and sometimes EDI (equality, diversity and inclusion) in the UK.
Paul Sesay, the founder and chief executive of the National Diversity Awards, whose sponsors include Amazon, Auto Trader and HSBC, said: “It’s rebranded to ‘wellbeing’, ‘belonging’ and ‘culture’. Even with roles, it’s no longer heads of DEI, it’s heads of culture, heads of people, heads of wellbeing.
“They’re basically embedding diversity and getting rid of the word – I don’t necessarily see it as a bad thing. When I first started, back in 2003, it was about diversity – and that was the main word – but then, as it progressed, it was inclusion. It’s advancing now to culture, transformation, that kind of thing, as culture affects the whole organisation.”
In the UK, the Reform party has vowed to scrap DEI initiatives from councils it controls, months after the Trump administration begansacking black public servantsandripping up fairness policies.
Experts believe a full-scale rollback is unlikely in the UK, where the Equalities Act and the legal risk of discrimination cases present barriers to turning back the clock.
Butsome companies, particularly US-headquartered firms, have already scaled back some commitments,and are less keen to celebrate inclusion work publicly.
Sesay said US businesses were finding ways to disguise DEI work so they could still promote the best talent and address inequalities. “American companies have had to change, simply to survive in America. They have to take the word diversity out of absolutely everything. I’ve heard a few firms that say inclusion is allowed within their policies, but the word diversity isn’t.”
Noreen Biddle Shah, who founded Reboot, a campaigning group of senior financial service professionals, to tackle racial inequality in the industry in 2019, said the “landscape feels very different” now.
“DEI has become a politically charged term, and many firms are either stepping back from the work – a trend we saw coming from the US, but it is impacting UK financial services too,” said Shah.
“Not only do fewer organisations want to partner with us, but they’re also discouraging their own employees from speaking out. In our latest annual Race to Equality: Financial Services report, we found that in light of the DEI backlash, ethnic minority professionals in the sector feel muzzled for speaking out – many expressed fear of losing their jobs if they raised race-related concerns. And sadly, 70% said there has been little progress since theBlack Lives Matter movement.”
Even beforethe retrenchment driven by Trump’s return, there was concerncompanies were drawing back from promisesmade in 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement sparked a conversation across the west about societal fairness.
Nina Mohanty, a finalist in Veuve Clicquot’s Bold Future awards 2025, which celebrates rising female entrepreneurs, and who is the founder of a tech startup, Bloom Money, said: “In the world of startups and tech companies, you had a lot of VCs [venture capitalists] that were saying, ‘we’re gonna do special programmes for black entrepreneurs, we’re gonna back more women and women of colour’. And there are a lot of initiatives and there’s a lot of talk. Five years on, where are those things? The budgets are gone.”
James Hockin, an employment law expert and partner at global law firm Withers who advises senior executives in New York and London, said Trump’s unpopularity among some people also meant employees were exerting pressure on British employers to keep policies in place.
“We’ve got more people in the UK now saying, ‘well, what are we saying on this? I don’t like what Trump is doing on DEI’,” he said.
“There has been for a little while, a bit of a temptation just to keep quiet and let it happen and just go, ‘OK, let’s just wait and see’. But I think increasingly, with pressure from employees, there is a desire for employers to be seen to be taking a stance.”
Agreeing that DEI would survive but in a “rebranded” form, Hockin said: “DEI, for employers at least, started from a place of sorting out the culture in an organisation so that you weren’t leaving yourself vulnerable to a [legal] claim against your organisation –employers were keen to mitigate their risk.
“Where employers are getting on side with the Trump agenda, inadvertently, what they’re doing, is potentially opening themselves up to that risk.”
Earlier this year, Shirine Khoury-Haq, the CEO of Co-op group, warned that a DEI rollback risked undoing decades of progress.Zahoor Ahmad, Co-op’s head of social mobility, said: “The key assumption is that if you didn’t have [DEI], everything will be a level playing field. All of human history tells us that is not true. It’s very hard to have a true meritocracy, when we are not born equal. What we are trying to do is eliminate inequalities.”
A number of trade bodies have also doubled down on their commitment to inclusion in the face of the backlash.
The Law Society’s president, Richard Atkinson, said that while “the current climate in the United States has made diversity and inclusion work increasingly difficult”, the organisation would never waver from its “wholehearted” commitment to a more diverse and inclusive legal profession.
UK Finance, which represents the banking and financial service sector, said greater diversity was “a driver for economic success,” while the Local Government Association said the case for DEI remained “compelling”.
Dawar Hashmi, a director at Penna, a leading recruiter for senior local government executives, said: “There has been a noticeable pullback in the UK within some sectors – when the US sneezes, the UK catches a cold. This trend concerns me. But the public sector, our primary client base, continues to champion these values. Embracing DEI isn’t just morally right, its actually a strategic advantage.”