In his annual letter to shareholders this April, JPMorgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon reaffirmed his bank’s commitment to its diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, saying that they “make us a more inclusive company and lead to more innovation, smarter decisions and better financial results for us and for the economy overall”. There was a time when this statement might have passed without notice among the countless similar pronouncements from businesses. Yet it stood out more than it might have done in 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to a rush to introduce corporate DEI programmes and chief diversity officers became the hottest senior-level hires.

There was a time when this statement might have passed without notice among the countless similar pronouncements from businesses. Yet it stood out more than it might have done in 2020, when the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to a rush to introduce corporate DEI programmes and chief diversity officers became the hottest senior-level hires. That’s in part because in June 2023, a ruling by the US Supreme Court changed the diversity landscape, preventing American academic institutions from considering race in their admissions processes. While not directly affecting companies, the decision triggered lawsuits targeting the DEI programmes at a number of groups, sending corporate lawyers scrambling to review their companies’ diversity policies.

The US is not alone in questioning approaches to workforce diversity. “So much of this is driven by the Supreme Court, but that didn’t spring from nothing,” says Kenji Yoshino, director of NYU Law’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. Nor are other parts of the world exempt from having to tread carefully with respect to the law. In the EU, for example, GDPR legislation on information privacy can make it hard for companies to collect and use monitoring data on the diverse attributes of their workers, such as race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. Legal concerns aside, in many markets, there is an increasing recognition that diversity is not just about achieving balance in the make-up of the workforce, but also whether or not diverse employees feel able to thrive. And definitions of diversity are expanding from gender and race to diversity of education, thought, economic background and neurodiversity (referring to those with physical differences that affect how their brain works).

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Source: Financial Time, Sarah Murray, June 2024