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Companies that maintained their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives performed better than those that removed them in the face of anti-DEI threats from the Trump administration, according to new research reported by The Guardian last Friday. The research’s findings contradict right-wing claims that companies that “go woke, go broke.”
The research — conducted by Jacob Grumbach, an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy — analyzed the stock market performance of 500 of the largest publicly traded companies in the US (aka “the S&P 500”).
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Trump’s anti-DEI executive orders, issued at the start of his presidency in 2025, directed federal agencies to contractually obligate contractors to certify that they neither have nor promote any DEI programs, which Trump claimed are an illegal and immoral violation of federal law. Furthermore, the order threatened legal action against corporations, large nonprofits, philanthropic foundations, professional associations, and institutions of higher education that have DEI-related initiatives.
However, while social pressure campaigns, led by anti-DEI conservative activists like Robby Starbuck, successfully got some companies to end their DEI commitments — companies such as Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniels’ parent company Brown-Forman, Ford Motor Co., Lowe’s, Tractor Supply Co., John Deere, and Caterpillar Inc. — Grumbach noted that these companies may have ended these commitments because their leaders felt that the brands could not weather such political storms.
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However, numerous other companies stood by their DEI commitments, even after Trump’s threats and right-wing pressure campaigns, including Costco, Apple, Delta Air Lines, Microsoft, NFL, Cisco, Deutsche Bank, Patagonia, Coca-Cola, and Kroger.
Grumbach told The Guardian that there’s “no perfect way” to measure whether a firm is pulling back its DEI policies. He tracked companies’ DEI policies by analyzing news coverage, pulling anti-DEI shareholder proposals and votes on those proposals, and using data from a watchdog activist group called DEI Watch.
Grumbach found that not only did keeping DEI commitments ultimately not impact the companies’ financial performance, but that companies may have some leeway to continue performing well, even after resisting threatening government policies.
“What happens when you don’t comply with that executive branch pressure in a moment of great fear in these civil society organizations?” Grumbach said. “This shows that large US corporations really do have leeway and the ability to sort of do noncompliance to executive branch pressure and end up fine.”
The HRC Foundation’s Pride in the Marketplace 2026 consumer report found that 79.3% of LGBTQ+ adults hold favorable views of DEI efforts.
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