The diversity pendulum: predictors of DEI shifts in corporate America

Abstract Between 2020 and 2025, United States companies demonstrated unprecedented swings in their commitments to DEI. This manuscript addresses predictors of why some firms sustain their commitments to DEI while others retreat in the face of sustained political backlash. Drawing on institutional theory, we test the predictive power of three mechanisms to explain firms’ reactions to political and social attacks on DEI practices: coercive pressures (state laws), mimetic pressures (industry leaders), and normative pressures (racial and gender compositions of CEOs and boards). Two author-constructed datasets were developed. The first dataset contained DEI communications within annual shareholder letters for S&P 500 firms. The second was a proprietary dataset with supplemental data that tracked firms’ public-facing practices, policies, and commitments to DEI. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found that the passage of anti-DEI laws in states where firms were headquartered (i.e., coercive pressure) contributed to sustained firm commitment to DEI rather than retreat. Consistent with our hypothesis, we found that the presence of historically underrepresented leaders on companies’ boards (i.e., normative pressure) positively related to sustained commitment to DEI. We did not find support for the influence of industry leaders (mimetic pressure), nor of CEO gender or race, on firms’ DEI-related actions.