UK business leaders are not adjusting their approach to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) despite many high profile American counterparts rowing back on their policies in the face of pressure from the Trump administration, a survey has found.
According to a poll conducted by the Institute of Directors (IoD), more than seven in 10 (71 per cent) bosses said they plan ‘no change’ to their current approach to diversity, with four per cent planning to scale up DEI activities.
The finding runs counter to a widespread narrative that British firms had begun to replicate US business winding down their DEI efforts in the face of pressure from Donald Trump.
Within days of his inauguration, the US President signed two Executive Orders that clamped down on DEI within government and compelled federal agencies to “combat” private-sector diversity initiatives.
The move provoked several blue-chip US firms – including the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Disney and Amazon – to scrap their current policies or remove any mention of DEI in their annual reports.
The widespread retreat prompted speculation that business leaders might look to do the same in the UK, or that there would be spillover from US firms with operations and a presence in Britain.
London-listed WPP, the majority of whose revenue comes from the US, removed all mention of DEI in its annual report it published last week.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs’s most senior non-US executive, Richard Gnodde, said in an interview in February that it had decided to scrap a rule that prevented it from advising all-male, all-white boards on an IPO because it had “served its purpose”.
There has also been evidence of the trend in the public sector, where a government push to slash burdensome red tape at the UK’s regulators led the Financial Conduct Authority and the Bank of England’s Prudential Regulation Authority to abort their plans to police diversity.
But the IoD research, which polled 605 of the business group’s members, suggests that that speculation might be misplaced, with the body’s policy chief Alex Hall-Chan, saying the vast majority of UK workplaces “can expect no change”.
Just one in ten business leaders said they plan to scale down their activities, while eight per cent said they planned to review their approach later in the year.
“Particularly for employers with no US presence, the prevailing view among British businesses is that decisions made by US government and US companies will have little to no bearing on investment in their own [DEI] programmes,” he said.