International consulting firm Accenture has said that it will halt its gender quotas and other diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to comply with US President Donald Trump’s executive orders.
The company’s chief exec Julie Sweet announced the change in an email to staff on Friday morning.
In a memo the company said that it would start “sunsetting” the diversity goals it set in 2017, along with career development programs for “people of specific demographic groups”.
Sweet said Accenture’s policy change followed an “evaluation of our internal policies and practices and the evolving landscape in the United States, including recent executive orders with which we must comply”.
Sweet did caveat the note, saying that all the announcements were subject to local laws and “tailored to the needs of our local markets”. It would also continue to support its Employee Resource Groups and Networks, which are “open to all of our people and have broad participation, membership and allyship,” said Sweet. It would also continue its processes to deliver global pay equity.
Accenture will continue to report its demographics publicly in the markets where they are reported. Sweet said this was an effective way to “attract and retain” the “best people”.
Sweet wrote in the memo that DEI targets would no longer be used to measure staff performance and it would pause submitting data to external diversity benchmarking surveys. It would also evaluate external partnerships on the topic “as part of refreshing our talent strategy”, Sweet said in the memo.
In line with goals set in 2017 and 2020, women currently make up 48 per cent of Accenture’s workforce and 30 per cent of managing director roles, according to its latest annual report. B&T has contacted Accenture to ascertain if the changes apply to its Accenture Song creative group and its Droga5 creative agency.
Earlier this year, Meta said that it would be ending its DEI efforts. An internal memo, which was reported by Axios confirmed that Meta’s DE&I programs were being turfed, citing changing “legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States”.
However, a Meta Australia spokesperson told B&T that although the Diversity Slate Approach has been abandoned, it will have minimal impact in how the company finds and recruits talent in this market.
“This doesn’t change our approach to hiring diverse teams in our workforce, which include people from different races, sexuality, political views and so on because we believe diverse teams perform better,” the spokesperson said.
“We continue to believe in having a multi-talented workforce made up of cognitively diverse teams. We will always value teams with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. They are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities, ultimately helping us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone.
Last week, Google also announced that it would be canning its DEI efforts. “We’ll continue to invest in states across the US—and in many countries globally—but in the future we will no longer have aspirational goals,” the email said.
Fiona Cicconi, the company’s chief people officer, said in the email that the company has “always been committed to creating a workplace where we hire the best people wherever we operate, create an environment where everyone can thrive, and treat everyone fairly. That’s exactly what you can expect to see going forward.”
Google provided no update on the local operations to B&T.
