Blows my mind how fast this switch was. I thought it would trail off over years, but its like everyone decided at once to drop DEI.
Two reasons for the speed of the switch.
The first is preference falsification Cascade.
The second is the fact that businesses are legally obligated through their fiduciary duty to maximize value for shareholders. Many of these Dei programs couldn't logically be justified through the lens of maximizing shareholder value, so once they were no longer legally mandated, in a sense, there was a pre-existing legal mandate to remove them.
All anyone had to do was sit through one all-hands with the DEI consultant running through a slide deck that was clearly unaltered aside from the logo in the top left to understand how much of a scam it was.
No, no one really liked those programs. But there was no choice. Now there's a choice and you can see where they stand.
[dead]
Was Shopify just running a team it didn't want until government changed? Doesn't sound very private sector to me. What other things do these companies do just to appease current administrations/cultural trends?
Why must we hold true that this is simply posturing to appease the populist whims of a current American administration?
If we believe corporations are rationally working toward their own profit goals, the idea that they've become overt Trump activists seems like an emotional interpretation. We either need to maintain the concept of corporate amorality or decide everything, including an insensitive invisible hand, has somehow become pro-Trump.
I think there are other logical premises for and against DEI if you strip corporations of this veneer of social responsibility:
1. DEI was only ever a PR exercise, to score higher in ESG-related investments or to attract talent;
2. DEI provided them with a positive image to downstream customers;
3. DEI provided new hiring channels when conventional ones were failing HR departments during a constrained hiring market.
It seems that DEI has become a cost center, and that cost is greater than the negative PR cost they're taking by getting rid of it.
The above benefits may no longer hold true, but I'd also suspect that some of these companies are worried about retaliatory action of the new DOJ interpreting DEI initiatives as a discriminatory thus illegal hiring practice. Litigation against the federal government is expensive. Being shut out of a labor market also is.
Shopify may be a Canadian company, but one that also hires globally remote and the USA is a huge source of that talent.
Shopify is Canadian.
Well that's very embarrassing. Thanks for clearing that up. But now I'm even more curious/confused. Why now?
Because Shopify leadership supports Trump, and it's CEO specifically stated that Canada should have "de-escalated and not retaliated" on tariffs that are being imposed arbitrarily.
Shopify has been very vocal of it's defense of free speech, most specifically when supporting the decision to platform some pretty awful organizations. There is a long history of this, but this recent article notes that they specifically removed restrictions on hateful content from their TOS.
Lutke had previously denounced concerns about 'woke' ideology as destructive to teams, so it's pretty easy (for me at least) to see that Shopify would be eager to use the political cover of Trump's DOJ crackdown on businesses with DEI practices as cover to eliminate those teams.
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I mean, this comes from the same platform that’s had no problem hosting Breitbart and other far right and neo-Nazi storefronts.
Hell, wasn’t the COO’s wife running True North Media?
Blows my mind how fast this switch was. I thought it would trail off over years, but its like everyone decided at once to drop DEI.
Two reasons for the speed of the switch.
The first is preference falsification Cascade.
The second is the fact that businesses are legally obligated through their fiduciary duty to maximize value for shareholders. Many of these Dei programs couldn't logically be justified through the lens of maximizing shareholder value, so once they were no longer legally mandated, in a sense, there was a pre-existing legal mandate to remove them.
All anyone had to do was sit through one all-hands with the DEI consultant running through a slide deck that was clearly unaltered aside from the logo in the top left to understand how much of a scam it was.
No, no one really liked those programs. But there was no choice. Now there's a choice and you can see where they stand.
[dead]
Was Shopify just running a team it didn't want until government changed? Doesn't sound very private sector to me. What other things do these companies do just to appease current administrations/cultural trends?
Why must we hold true that this is simply posturing to appease the populist whims of a current American administration?
If we believe corporations are rationally working toward their own profit goals, the idea that they've become overt Trump activists seems like an emotional interpretation. We either need to maintain the concept of corporate amorality or decide everything, including an insensitive invisible hand, has somehow become pro-Trump.
I think there are other logical premises for and against DEI if you strip corporations of this veneer of social responsibility:
1. DEI was only ever a PR exercise, to score higher in ESG-related investments or to attract talent;
2. DEI provided them with a positive image to downstream customers;
3. DEI provided new hiring channels when conventional ones were failing HR departments during a constrained hiring market.
It seems that DEI has become a cost center, and that cost is greater than the negative PR cost they're taking by getting rid of it.
The above benefits may no longer hold true, but I'd also suspect that some of these companies are worried about retaliatory action of the new DOJ interpreting DEI initiatives as a discriminatory thus illegal hiring practice. Litigation against the federal government is expensive. Being shut out of a labor market also is.
Shopify may be a Canadian company, but one that also hires globally remote and the USA is a huge source of that talent.
Shopify is Canadian.
Well that's very embarrassing. Thanks for clearing that up. But now I'm even more curious/confused. Why now?
Because Shopify leadership supports Trump, and it's CEO specifically stated that Canada should have "de-escalated and not retaliated" on tariffs that are being imposed arbitrarily.
https://x.com/tobi/status/1885906286950363546
Shopify has been very vocal of it's defense of free speech, most specifically when supporting the decision to platform some pretty awful organizations. There is a long history of this, but this recent article notes that they specifically removed restrictions on hateful content from their TOS.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/holocaust-denial-merchandise-...
Lutke had previously denounced concerns about 'woke' ideology as destructive to teams, so it's pretty easy (for me at least) to see that Shopify would be eager to use the political cover of Trump's DOJ crackdown on businesses with DEI practices as cover to eliminate those teams.
[flagged]
I mean, this comes from the same platform that’s had no problem hosting Breitbart and other far right and neo-Nazi storefronts.
Hell, wasn’t the COO’s wife running True North Media?
https://pressprogress.ca/shopify-executives-right-wing-media...
The only reason they pulled Kanye’s storefront was because they considered it to be “unauthentic”, not because he was selling swastikas.
Yeah but they sold communist items as well.