Wall Street’s DEI Retreat Has Officially Begun
Programs once meant for people of color and women are now open to all.
By Max Abelson, Simone Foxman, and Ava Benny-Morrison, March 4, 2024
Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has made a surprising change to its “Possibilities Summit” for Black college students: It’s opened the program to White students.
At Bank of America Corp., certain internal programs that used to focus on women and minorities have been broadened to include everyone.
And at Bank of New York Mellon Corp., executives are being urged to reconsider hard metrics for workforce diversity. Lose them, lawyers have advised.
This is what diversity, equity and inclusion looks like on Wall Street today: anxious, fraught – and changing fast.
Bank executives are moving to head off accusations of reverse discrimination.Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg
From C-suites down, American finance is quietly reassessing its promises to level the playing field. The growing conservative assault on DEI, coupled with pockets of resentment among White employees, have executives moving to head off accusations of reverse discrimination. It’s not just Wall Street. In recent weeks, Zoom Video Communications Inc. cut its internal DEI team amid broader layoffs and Tesla Inc. removed language about minority workers from a regulatory filing.
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The seemingly small changes — lawyerly tweaks, executives call them — are starting to add up to something big: the end of a watershed era for diversity in the US workplace, and the start of a new, uncertain one.
“We’re past the peak,” said Subha Barry, former head of diversity at Merrill Lynch.
Wall Street has long skewed White and male, as it still does. Even an inkling that banks are retreating from DEI has some women and minorities questioning how real promises of change were in the first place.
Publicly, executives insist they’re as dedicated as ever. Goldman Sachs and other major US banks say they remain committed to attracting and promoting people from a range of backgrounds. Privately, however, many acknowledge that the high-profile campaign against DEI— amplified by billionaires including Elon Musk and Bill Ackman — threatens to set back what progress Wall Street has made.
THE DEI THAT DID-IN HARVARD’s PRESIDENT-—source: Fr thread
Harvard deleted nearly all DEI materials from its website following President Claudine Gay’s disastrous congressional testimony, in which she declined to say whether advocating for the genocide of Jews is permissible on campus. Recovered DEI documents through an Internet archive show
<><>DEI urges students to internalize the Critical Race Theory narrative,
<><>that America is systemically racist,
<><>that it is riddled with white-baiting code words
<><>words like “police brutality,” “white supremacist violence,” “weaponization of whiteness.”
<><>students are told to “unpack” their so-called “white” and “male” privileges,
<><>to consider their “white fragility,”
<><>ghetto-nurtured DEI says white privilege accrues to whites
<><>b/c of a society that protects and insulates them from race-based stress.
Regarding this clip:
Wall Street has long skewed White and male, as it still does. Even an inkling that banks are retreating from DEI has some women and minorities questioning how real promises of change were in the first place.The reason Wall St is mostly male is that it is a tough business and, in no uncertain terms, skews toward top performance. There's a lot of money involved and there's no room for anyone but the best.
It's a macho business because it requires toughness, but there are plenty of tough women and minorities.
People who are pussy cats of any gender or race don't stand a chance.
As an aside, I spent the biggest part of my career as an investment banker on Wall St. I was always shocked when some (a very few) people working for me brought up the subject of "life or family balance." That doesn't exist in firms that strive to be the best.