Retailers and Big Four accounting firms aren’t the only ones rolling back their DEI programs this year: Some of the nation’s largest banks are doing so as well. In February, Citi said it would reverse a policy of requiring a diverse slate of job candidates and removed DEI from the name of its DEI and talent function, rebranding it the “Talent Management and Engagement” team. And Goldman Sachs discontinued a policy of only working with public companies that had two or more diverse board members.
JPMorgan Chase, the country’s largest bank, has now joined its peers in revamping its DEI programs. In a memo to employees seen by Reuters, COO Jenn Piepszak said the bank would change the name of its DEI program to DOI, or “diversity, opportunity, and inclusion.” Some functions that once fell under the DEI team would now be relegated to the HR or corporate responsibility teams, she wrote.
“This means some activities, councils or chapters may be consolidated to streamline our process and engagement strategy,” she noted.
Responses to the EOs? The Trump administration’s anti-DEI executive orders (EO) are likely behind the banks’ walking back of DEI. In a January 21 EO, the administration argued that DEI “diminish[es] the importance of individual merit, aptitude, hard work, and determination.”
It ordered the heads of federal agencies and the Attorney General to “advance in the private sector the policy of individual initiative, excellence, and hard work,” to identify “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern,” and to explore avenues for litigation against companies. The administration’s anti-DEI EOs face legal challenges, but an appeals court has allowed them to be enacted while the lawsuits are in progress.
The EO may well have had a chilling effect upon banks’ DEI programs. Tony Fratto, a spokesman for Goldman, said that changes to DEI were made “as a result of legal developments related to board diversity requirements.” Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, said her bank will no longer pursue “aspirational representation goals” except those mandated by local laws.
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Though the portions of the JPMorgan memo Reuters quoted didn’t directly cite the executive orders, the language it uses reflects their emphasis on “merit.” “The ‘e’ always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes,” Piepszak wrote in the memo. “We’ve always been committed to hiring, compensation and promotion that are merit-based,” she wrote, as Bloomberg reported. “We do not have illegal quotas or pay incentives, and we would never turn someone away because of their political or religious beliefs, or because of who they are.”
Dimon supports some aspects of DEI, not others: JPMorgan’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, has publicly supported certain aspects of his bank’s DEI initiatives in recent months. In January, he said he opposed activist shareholders’ attempts to get the bank to soften or re-examine its DEI programs. “Bring it on,” he said about such proposals, Fortune reported.
“We are going to continue to reach out to the Black community, the Hispanic community, the LGBT community, the veterans community.” Dimon said then.
But, at an Ohio town hall meeting with staff, Dimon said that while he did want to continue to “lift up society” and preserve the bank’s “approach toward Black, Hispanic and LGBTQ communities,” he would cut DEI programs he viewed as wasteful, Bloomberg reported.
“I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid s–t, and it really pissed me off,” he said. “I’m just gonna cancel them. I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy.”