US firms that kept DEI policies despite ‘go woke, go broke’ threats thrived | DEI policies | The Guardian

US firms that kept DEI policies despite ‘go woke, go broke’ threats thrived

"Exclusive: Companies that kept policies did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as those that didn’t

Gaya Gupta

‘In the days after the executive orders were signed, companies that kept their DEI policies actually performed better on the stock market than those that didn’t.’ Composite: The Guardian/Getty Images

Conservative backlash was supposed to put an end to the diversity, inclusion and equity (DEI) movement as companies were warned “go woke, go broke”.

In January 2025, Donald Trump delivered a death knell, ending DEI within the federal government with executive orders and threatening to target companies that still supported it. Companies including Google, Goldman Sachs, McDonald’s and Walmart that had embraced DEI years earlier fell into line and announced an end to their policies.

But new research published Friday and shared exclusively with the Guardian found that companies that resisted the pressure and kept their DEI practices, including Costco, Apple and Delta Air Lines, performed just as well as their competitors who pulled back.

For the research, Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor at at the University of California at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, analyzed how S&P 500 companies fared after Trump’s January executive order. He used what economists define as “abnormal returns” – the difference between how a stock was expected to perform versus how it actually performed – to isolate the impact of a company’s DEI decision.

What he found was the firms that kept their DEI policies or voted down anti-DEI shareholder resolutions did just as well financially, even after Trump’s executive order, as firms that didn’t. In the days after the executive orders were signed, companies that kept their DEI policies actually performed better on the stock market than those that didn’t.

Whether or not DEI benefits a company’s bottom line can depend on its consumers. Grumbach noted companies that publicly stood firm on their DEI policies might have known they could weather a political storm. Apple, for example, may have known it could maintain its DEI efforts in a way that Tractor Supply, another prominent company that pulled back its policies, could not.

The “go woke, go broke” movement found its power in 2023, when a series of conservative backlashes against companies gained momentum. Bud Light sales dropped following a conservative boycott after the beer company featured transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney. Target became an embodiment of its name after fury erupted over its pride month merchandise. Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, embarked on a prolonged fight with Disney after the company vocally opposed the state’s “don’t say gay” bill. “Cracker Barrel has fallen,” a conservative group wrote after the restaurant chain celebrated pride month on social media

Then, also in 2023, the US supreme court ruled that race-conscious admissions policies in higher education were unconstitutional, opening the floodgates for legal challenges against DEI policies in other places, including the workplace.

“That really created a lot of fear and panic in corporate America and is what led to a lot of the pullbacks around DEI,” said David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at New York University’s law school. “When Trump came into office for the second time, that just poured fuel on an already raging fire.”

After Trump’s executive orders, companies had to weigh the risks. Many quietly scrapped the DEI promises they had made after the murder of George Floyd and the racial reckoning it inspired. Some ended up facing a reverse backlash: the Twin Cities Pride parade dropped Target, which is based in Minneapolis, as a sponsor after the company withdrew some of its DEI policies.

But the reality of this pullback was likely different from what was seen in the headlines, Glasgow said. Of the many companies he spoke to, most “made adjustments to their diversity principles on account of legal and regulatory environments”.

“Often what’s going on is something more in the messy middle, where they’re sticking with some things, deleting others and then reframing or rebranding some,” Glasgow said.

While there was “no perfect way” to measure whether a firm was pulling back its DEI policies, Grumbach kept track of company policies by analyzing news coverage, pulling anti-DEI shareholder proposals and keeping track of the proposals’ votes, and using data from an activist group called DEI Watch, which maintains a tracker of companies.

“No matter how we measure DEI in companies, we find the same answer,” he said: holding on to DEI promises ultimately had no impact on financial performance.

Grumbach said the implications go beyond DEI and illustrates how organizations fare after resisting authoritarian policies.

“What happens when you don’t comply with that executive branch pressure in a moment of great fear in these civil society organizations?” Grumbach said. “This shows that large US corporations really do have leeway and the ability to sort of do noncompliance to executive branch pressure and end up fine.”

US firms that kept DEI policies despite ‘go woke, go broke’ threats thrived | DEI policies | The Guardian

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How the Black Power Protest at the 1968 Olympics Killed Careers

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1968 Olympics Killed Careers

When Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their fists in protest at the 1968 Summer Games, Australian runner

Peter Norman stood by them. It lost him his career.

Erin BlakemoreRich Clarkson/Rich Clarkson & Associates/Getty Images

Published: February 22, 2018Last Updated: August 11, 2026

It’s an iconic image: Two athletes raise their fists on the Olympic podium. The photograph, taken after the 200 meter race at the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, turned African-American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos from track-and-field stars into the center of a roiling controversy over their raised-fist salute, a symbol of Black power and the human rights movement at large.

But look in the photo and you’ll see another man as well: silver medalist Peter Norman, a white Australian runner. Norman didn’t raise his fist that day, but he stood with Smith and Carlos. Though his show of solidarity ended up destroying Norman’s career, the three athletes’ actions that day would be just one in a line of protests on the athletic stage.

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Smith and Carlos, who had won gold and bronze, respectively, agreed to use their medal wins as an opportunity to highlight the social issues roiling the United States at the time. Racial tensions were at a height, and the Civil Rights movement had given way to the Black Power movement. African-Americans like Smith and Carlos were frustrated by what they saw as the passive nature of the Civil Rights movement. They sought out active forms of protests and advocated for racial pride, Black nationalism and dramatic action rather than incremental change.

It was only months after the assassination of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and protests against the Vietnam War were gaining steam as well. In the lead-up to the Olympics, Smith and Carlos helped organize the Olympic Project for Human Rights, a group that reflected their Black pride and social consciousness. The group saw the Olympic Games as an opportunity to agitate for better treatment of Black athletes and Black people around the world. Its demands included hiring more Black coaches and rescinding Olympic invitations to Rhodesia and South Africa, both of which practiced apartheid. Though the project initially proposed a boycott of the Olympics altogether, Smith and Carlos decided to compete in the hopes they could use their achievements as a platform for broader change.

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Then, just 10 days before the opening of the Summer Games, an unarmed group of protesters assembled in Mexico City’s Three Cultures Square to plan the next move of the growing Mexican students’ movement. The Mexican government sent in bulldozers to disperse the thousands gathered, and troops fired into the crowd, massacring between four (the government’s official count) and 3,000 students.

Carlos and Smith were deeply affected by these events and the plight of marginalized people around the world. “It was a cry for freedom and for human rights,” Smith told Smithsonian magazine in 2008. “We had to be seen because we couldn’t be heard.”

The third man on the podium became part of the protest, too, albeit in a less direct way. Before winning silver, Norman was a working-class boy from Melbourne, Australia, born in 1942. His family members were devout members of the Salvation Army, an evangelical group connected with the charitable group better known to Americans. Part of that faith was the belief that all men were equal.

Though he was poor growing up, Norman was an extraordinarily fast runner, and learned to race on spikes that his father, a butcher, borrowed due to lack of funds. In 1960, the teenager burst onto the national running scene as a junior, winning his first major title in Victoria. From then on, he became a major contender in Australian track and field. A powerful sprinter, his specialty was his finishes—an area in which some short-course runners falter.

He displayed that skill during the 200 meter final on October 16, 1968, at Mexico City’s Olympic Stadium. Though Norman had finished strong in the qualifying rounds, he was underestimated by the other runners—until, at the very end of the medal race, he edged in front of John Carlos at the finish line. “Out of nowhere, Norman stormed down the last 50 meters, taking the line before a shocked Carlos,” writes CNN’s James Montague. Norman finished his sprint second with a time of 20.06 seconds and qualified for a silver medal.

The final of the Men’s 200 meter event at the 1968 Summer Games. From left to right: Peter Norman of Australia, and Larry Questad, John Carlos and Tommie Smith of the United States. (Credit: Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

At the time, Australia was experiencing racial tensions of its own. For years, it had been governed by its “White Australia Policy,” which dramatically limited immigration to the country by non-white people. While the Australian government welcomed new residents from predominantly white areas like the Baltics, it regularly turned down non-European migrants. In 1966, the government made the first steps toward abolishing the policy, but its effects reverberated throughout Australia. Non-Australians weren’t the only people discriminated against: Aboriginal Australians, too, were historically oppressed in the country, which forced Aboriginal children into boarding schools, while removing others from their families and placing them with white households.

Norman supported his fellow Olympians’ protest, in part because of the intolerance he had witnessed in Australia. “Australia was not a crucible of tolerance,” notes Steve Georgakis, a sports studies specialist from Australia. “Norman, a teacher and guided by his Salvation Army faith, took part in the Black Power salute because of this opposition to racism and the White Australia Policy.”

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As the athletes waited to go to the podium, Carlos and Smith told Norman that they planned to use their win as an opportunity to protest. Smith and Carlos decided to appear on the podium bearing symbols of protest and strength: black-socked feet without shoes to bring attention to Black poverty, beads to protest lynchings, and raised, black-gloved fists to represent their solidarity and support with Black people and oppressed people around the world.

“I looked at my feet in my high socks and thought about all the Black poverty I’d seen from Harlem to East Texas. I fingered my beads and thought about the pictures I’d seen of the ‘strange fruit’ swinging from the poplar trees of the South,” Carlos later wrote.

Peter Norman, Tommie Smith and John Carlos after receiving their medals. (Credit: Patrice Habans/Paris Match/Getty Images)

Carlos realized he had forgotten his gloves, and Norman suggested the American athletes share a pair. The Australian also asked how he could support his fellow medalists. They suggested he wear a badge for the Olympic Project for Human Rights. Norman didn’t raise his fist, but by wearing the badge he made his stance clear.

As the American athletes raised their fists, the stadium hushed, then burst into racist sneers and angry insults. Smith and Carlos were rushed from the stadium, suspended by the U.S. team, and kicked out of the Olympic Village for turning their medal ceremony into a political statement. They went home to the United States, only to face serious backlash, including death threats.

However, Carlos and Smith were both gradually re-accepted into the Olympic fold, and went on to careers in professional football before retiring. Norman, meanwhile, was punished severely by the Australian sports establishment. Though he qualified for the Olympic team over and over again, posting the fastest times by far in Australia, he was snubbed by the team in 1972. Rather than allow Norman to compete, the Australians did not send a sprinter at all.

Peter Norman at Williamstown Beach, Australia, 2000. (Credit: Fairfax Media/Fairfax Media/Getty Images)

Norman immediately retired from the sport and began to suffer from depression, alcoholism and a painkiller addiction. “During that time,” writes Caroline Frost for the BBC, “he used his silver medal as a doorstop.”

Norman died without being acknowledged for his contributions to the sport. Though he kept his silver medal, he was regularly excluded from events related to the sport. Even when the Olympics came to Sydney in 2000, he was not recognized. When Norman died in 2006, Carlos and Smith, who had kept in touch with Norman for years, were pallbearers at the Australian’s funeral.

It took until 2012 for the Australian government to apologize for the treatment Norman received in his home country. But even though it cost him his career and much of his happiness, Norman would have done it over again. “I won a silver medal,” he told the New York Times in 2000. “But really, I ended up running the fastest race of my life to become part of something that transcended the Games.”