Diversity, Equity, Inclusion Hires Get Fired at Higher Rates Than Regular Workers, Says Research

Pedestrians walk past a 'Now Hiring' sign in Arlington, Va., on Mar. 16, 2022. (Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Workers engaged in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) roles have lost jobs at a higher rate than other employees since 2020, with Amazon registering the most number of such terminations, according to workforce analytics firm Revolio Labs.

Attrition rates for DEI roles at over 600 companies that have laid off workers since late 2020 outpaced that of non-DEI roles, states a Feb. 7th report by Revolio Labs. In the past six months, this trend has accelerated. Revolio’s analysis revealed that the churn rate for DEI-related roles at the 600 firms was 33 percent compared to only 21 percent for non-DEI positions.

“Over 300 DEI professionals have left from these companies in the last six months. Amazon, Twitter, and Nike have shed between five and 16 DEI professionals each, and Twitter’s infamous diversity team layoffs are not far behind,” Revolio stated.

“Bearing in mind the typically small size of DEI teams—the median DEI team size in this set of companies is three—these outflows likely amount to the exodus of entire diversity teams.”

Amazon took the top spot in the list of “largest outflows of DEI talent with seniority cutoff since July 2022,” with 16 employees laid off. This was followed by Applebee’s with 10 layoffs, Twitter with more than six, and Nike and Wayfair each at more than four.

Slashing DEI Jobs

DEI job openings were on an uptrend prior to the pandemic, and hit an all-time high at the beginning of March 2020, with more than 1,000 jobs listed at recruiting site Glassdoor at the time, according to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM).

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, DEI job hiring fell by 60 percent. DEI jobs were found to have fallen at twice the rate of overall job openings.

At the time, Valerie Frederickson, founder of executive search firm Frederickson Partners, in Menlo Park, California, said that “one of the first things companies cut is HR, and within HR, unfortunately, for many businesses, DEI is still considered nonessential,” according to SHRM.

Following the death of George Floyd in May 2020, many companies had pledged to invest in DEI roles. However, the trend has now changed.

In an interview with Forbes, Revelio Labs’ senior economist Reyhan Ayas stated that the loss of DEI roles is “just the tip of the iceberg because it is currently actively happening.”

“With the ‘last in, first out’ logic of layoffs, they’re really correcting for all the over-hiring that happened in the last two years,” Ayas said.

Acting Against DEI Agenda

In a Feb. 4th letter, Texas Republican governor Greg Abbott’s office warned public university leaders and state agencies that hiring for any reason other than merit is against the laws of the state. Both federal and state laws “forbid discrimination” in employment based on an individual’s race, it stated.

“Indeed, rather than increasing diversity in the workplace, these DEI initiatives are having the opposite effect and are being advanced in ways that proactively encourage discrimination in the workplace,” the letter said.

“Illegally adding DEI as a condition of employment leads to the exclusion and alienation of individuals from the workplace.” In recent years, “the innocuous-sounding notion of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) has been manipulated to push policies that expressly favor some demographic groups to the detriment of others.”

An analysis of data from 44 federal departments and agencies by The Epoch Times shows that these entities spent more than $2 million on speeches between Jan. 1, 2019, and Nov. 23, 2022.

Out of this $2 million, $800,000 went to speakers who talked about DEI and represented the largest spending category.