Candace Byrdsong Williams has filled the front room of her sunlit North Carolina home with sources of inspiration. Overflowing plants and photos of her three daughters share space with a brightly-painted sign of a favorite Bible verse: "God is within her, she will not fall."
Then there are the books: stacks of memoirs, business advice, and professional guides to the field now known as "diversity, equity, and inclusion," or DEI. That's where Byrdsong Williams, who generally radiates a calming optimism, spent the last 18 years of her career.
But her voice breaks as she picks up one textbook called, simply, The Chief Diversity Officer. The title represents the pinnacle of her once-hot profession, and the promotion she was working toward before she was laid off in August — and found the DEI job market had turned into a toxic wasteland.
"I was hoping that was going to be the next role," she says, "prior to the current political climate."
As she approached her 50th birthday last summer, Byrdsong Williams was pretty close to the top of her chosen field; her most recent job title was "global director of diversity, equity, and inclusion." But now, "chief diversity officer" seems like a promotion that will never happen — for her, and for thousands of U.S. workers.
The anti-DEI "political climate" Byrdsong Williams refers to has been slowly bubbling up for years — even before President Trump was re-elected, and set things to a hard boil by immediately signing executive orders banning what he calls "illegal DEI." Now scores of employers are in all-out retreat from anything adjacent to the word "diversity" — including the experienced DEI specialists who were once in high demand.
For example, just this month Verizon announced it was ending many of its DEI policies, as it sought the Federal Communications Commission's blessing for a $20 billion merger. It promised the agency that its human-resources department "will no longer have a team or any individual roles focused on DEI."
This retreat is decimating the job market for people like Byrdsong Williams. Since early 2023, U.S. employers have eliminated more than 2,600 jobs with words including "diversity" or "DEI" in the titles or descriptions, according to a data analysis conducted for NPR by the workforce analytics firm Revelio Labs.
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That accounts for about 13% of the DEI-related jobs that existed in early 2023, at the peak of the hiring boom, NPR is the first to report. Now that boom has shifted firmly into reverse.
The rise and fall of corporate DEI
This Sunday, May 25, marked the fifth anniversary of George Floyd's murder by a white police officer and the start of a national reckoning over systemic racism. Corporate America rushed to join in, loudly proclaiming that businesses should and would do more to fight discrimination and create more opportunities for workers of all backgrounds.
However superficial some of these promises turned out to be, big companies spent a lot of money on them — and hired thousands to implement them. By early 2023, U.S. companies employed more than 20,000 people focused on DEI. That was more than double the number of such jobs five years earlier, according to Revelio Labs' analysis of 8.8 million employers.
But almost as soon as companies had staffed up these DEI teams, they faced a backlash — from conservative influencers, activists, lawyers, and state and federal officials. These critics argue that DEI is itself discriminatory, and that employers have added barriers for white people, especially white men, to get jobs or promotions, even if they are the most qualified candidates.
The DEI backlash really started gaining steam in 2023, when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action at colleges and universities. That same year, Bud Light lost more than $1 billion in sales due to a conservative boycott, after it hired a transgender influencer for a brief promotional video.
Then, within hours of his second inauguration, Trump ramped up the attacks with his executive orders. He called the programs "radical and wasteful" and discriminatory against non-minorities who, he said, are denied opportunities and recognition. Since then, his administration has declared open war on diversity programs from government agencies to universities, law firms, cultural institutions and more.
Now more big companies are fleeing the field. Walmart, Target, Amazon, and Meta are just a few of the mega-employers that have ended some of their DEI policies in the past six months, as dozens of others scrubbed words like "diversity" from even their driest public documents.
That's having a crushing professional impact on people like Byrdsong Williams, who was laid off even before Trump was elected, and who now has to contend with a job market that is both smaller and more crowded. She's more than nine months into her search.
"It's been pretty tough," she says. "I just didn't think it would take this long."
A loss of more than 2,600 DEI jobs in two years
The day-to-day work of making employers more inclusive tends to be — like most human resources work — both important and incredibly mundane.
People in these jobs generally manage the practical logistics of trying to create workplaces that are more welcoming for all employees — and more attractive to a broader pool of qualified candidates.
Byrdsong Williams, for example, has created mentoring programs so that workers who don't come from the same schools or backgrounds as a company's top executives still have an opportunity to learn from them — and network. She's developed resource groups to give underrepresented workers a better peer support system. She's helped employers expand their recruiting efforts for new hires, for example by spending more time at historically Black colleges and universities.
This kind of work benefits most employers because it makes it easier to hire and retain good employees. Even some of the companies who are ending their DEI policies acknowledge this: "Delivering for customers requires attracting the best talent from across the country," Verizon told the FCC this month, adding that it remains "committed to creating a culture that leverages and values each person's unique strengths and talents."
Verizon is in good company: Many of the employers retreating from DEI have said that they "remain committed to creating a culture where everyone can be successful," as a Walmart spokesperson told NPR. And in some cases, they've renamed diversity initiatives with more generic terms. Target and Walmart now talk about "belonging," while Meta's one-time chief diversity officer now oversees something called "accessibility and engagement."
Some big companies, including Costco and Delta Air Lines, are publicly defending their DEI initiatives (and the language they use to discuss them). Investors in Apple, Levi's, and others have shrugged off anti-DEI shareholder proposals this spring.
And some business and workplace experts say that even the companies that have announced DEI retreats are mostly making superficial and semantic changes, while remaining committed to the underlying goals of creating more opportunities for all workers.
But they're not hiring as many people to do this work anymore, whatever it's called. Revelio Labs reports that companies are now more likely to post jobs that mention "belonging," "social impact" or "culture" — but even those have fallen significantly from 2022.
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"There is still more demand for DEI roles and similar roles than we saw at the beginning of 2020 — but it does look like these are trending to reach levels back to where we all started," says Paulina Tilly, a data scientist at Revelio Labs who conducted the analysis for NPR.
Meanwhile, chief diversity officers have been resigning, retiring or getting laid off — and they are not being replaced. (This includes at NPR, which has not named another chief diversity officer since Keith Woods retired this spring. NPR has said it "remains committed to serving a diverse workforce," and spokesperson Heather Walls says via email that NPR's remaining Office of Diversity personnel will now report to its chief operating officer, "as part of broader strategic changes to NPR's senior leadership structure.")
Executive recruiters confirm that they're seeing a slowdown in companies seeking chief diversity officers and other top executives. "It's a challenging time to be in diversity, equity and inclusion work," says Yen Ling Shek of Russell Reynolds Associates, a global recruiting and advisory firm.
"It's not only about the things that you can see"
All of this leaves veterans like Byrdsong Williams, with nearly two decades of experience in what she calls "my heart's work," facing prolonged unemployment. There's also her fear and pain at seeing her profession publicly vilified.
"I just want a company to see me," she says. "Which is really ironic — because part of DEI is being seen and being heard."
With DEI under attack, many in corporate America stopped talking about it. The omerta has left many people working in diversity feeling isolated, worried about their employment prospects — and terrified of discussing it in public.
But in February, after multiple job interviews went nowhere, Byrdsong Williams decided to speak out. She posted on LinkedIn about her layoff, how "fewer DEI roles exist due to the political climate," and how she's trying to take time to "breathe, enjoy life and reflect" while job hunting.
"The world has taken a step back, in just the narrative, overnight. It's been crazy," she said in late March, at her home in a leafy rural suburb near Raleigh.
Byrdsong Williams grew up in the area; she studied occupational health in college and lived part-time in Europe with her then-husband as they started a family. But when her marriage ended, Byrdsong Williams settled back home with her three daughters, who are now young adults.
In 2007, she started a claims adjuster job for Nationwide, the insurance company — but her degree and early experience working in human resources caught an executive's eye. Soon, Byrdsong Williams was asked to help start up a regional program focused on what was then called "diversity and inclusion," or "D&I."
She recalls leading one meeting with a colleague who didn't seem to be paying attention to what she was saying. But her professional irritation melted once she learned the cause of the seeming disrespect: Her colleague was partially deaf, and struggling to lip-read Byrdsong Williams' usual rapid cadence.
That experience made her realize that "diversity runs so deep. It's not only about the things that you can see."
"I remember getting excited," she recalls. "It became my life's mission at that point."
As she gained more experience, bigger employers started calling. She worked for tech giant Cisco and the software startup GitLab, which hired her to oversee "diversity, inclusion, and belonging" as it got ready to go public in 2021. (That IPO also gave her a decent stock payday, which she says has become a financial cushion during her unemployment.)
By 2021, corporate America was hitting Peak DEI, and Byrdsong Williams was fielding weekly calls or emails from recruiters. "My inbox was completely on fire," she recalls.
Today, it's in a deep freeze. Byrdsong Williams was laid off by her most recent employer, a private software startup, in early August. Since then, she has interviewed for two separate jobs where, after several rounds of interviews, she was told that the company was no longer hiring to fill the position. In one case, she saw the company later post a similar job description — with no reference to diversity, equity, or inclusion.
"I don't understand how it has come to a place of just taboo: 'Don't talk about it,'" she says.
Asked if she's given up on her dream of becoming a chief diversity officer, Byrdsong Williams paused for several seconds, fighting back tears.
"I'm not chasing the title," she said. "I just want to do good work until it's time for me to retire."
The DEI retreat disproportionately hurts women and people of color
Those who work in DEI acknowledge that the profession's goals haven't always been well-defined at every employer. Some companies have damaged its reputation by treating DEI as a superficial buzzword, or by promising short-term financial benefits that never materialized, or by making ambitious promises without thinking through what it would cost to fulfill them.
"Companies often spent too much time and energy on initiatives that didn't have a measurable impact," says Joelle Emerson, CEO of workplace consultancy Paradigm.
"I've seen companies focus on initiatives that made them look super progressive, for example, while still failing to do basic things — like ensuring promotion practices are fair, or improving hiring processes so that people from all backgrounds are evaluated fairly," she adds.
But on the whole, many working in DEI argue that critics who call it discriminatory are fundamentally — and often willfully — misinterpreting their profession.
"The work of inclusion and diversity is actually making the workplace better for most people, without giving — and without taking — anything away from anyone," says Jeffrey Siminoff, a longtime executive who created and ran such initiatives for Morgan Stanley, Apple and Twitter.
Siminoff was an employment lawyer at Morgan Stanley in 2010 when he was asked to take over running its "inclusion and diversity" program. He was also, he says, a one-time "closeted gay man" who had spent his early career worried that his identity would prevent him from advancing professionally. Siminoff says that fear distracted him from fully focusing on his job or performing at his best.
Getting involved in Morgan Stanley's resource group for LGBTQ employees was a game-changer. "On a personal level, it was like this boulder had been pulled off of each shoulder," he says.
"Those opportunities existed not to give me a leg up over somebody else," he adds, "but to simply allow me to do my best work, unburdened by silly things that didn't need to be there."
As Siminoff points out, many people who specialize in diversity work have some lived experience with feeling marginalized in corporate America. Black women like Byrdsong Williams, for example, hold fewer than 3% of the top "C-Suite" executive jobs in corporate America, even though they account for nearly 8% of the U.S. population.
For a few years, the DEI hiring boom offered more opportunities. According to Revelio Labs, women accounted for more than 71% of all DEI professionals from 2020 through 2024 — compared with 51% of other roles. Black and Hispanic workers together held only 21% of other jobs — but 33% of DEI roles.
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Moreover, companies that remain committed to diversity do in fact tend to hire a more diverse workforce, especially Black and Asian workers, than companies without DEI teams, Revelio Labs found.
That means that corporate America's DEI retreat is having an outsized impact on underrepresented employees — both the executives who run these initiatives, and the more diverse workforces they helped create.
"Getting rid of these DEI functions is really going to pare back the diversity of the workplace, even to be felt years from now," says Tilly.
While some DEI employees hope their work will continue under names such as "belonging" or "cultural transformation," Tilly sees a drop-off in those job titles too.
"It looks like a lot of the roles that they're moving into are just going to be more generalist [human resources] roles," she says.
Some veteran DEI executives are figuring out if they want to stick with the embattled field — or focus on something else. Siminoff, who's been consulting since leaving the nonprofit Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights last year, says it's a tough time for his profession.
"Doing this work right now is particularly complicated," he says. "And I'm just not sure that doing it, with all of this uncertainty, is something that I would choose right now."
Her "heart's work"
Byrdsong Williams is trying to keep the faith. She's applying for roles in "people" and "cultural transformation," and hoping that soon, an employer will look beyond the now-politicized buzzwords on her resume.
She's had a lot of practice staying positive over the last several months — including during her long-planned 50th birthday party last August, which she hosted a few weeks after being laid off.
It was a bittersweet bash. Byrdsong Williams invited more than 100 loved ones to an art museum in downtown Raleigh. Most of them didn't know about her job loss, and she didn't want to let it overshadow the evening. Instead, she put on a shimmering chartreuse dress and made a grand entrance dancing to Carl Carlton's 1981 funk classic "She's a Bad Mama Jama."
"I'm dancing, I'm having a moment, but I'm like — only a few in this room know that I don't have a job," she recalls. "Is this really happening?"
During an overcast afternoon this spring, Byrdsong Williams returned to the museum where she hosted that party. There was a new exhibit up: bright, joyous, larger-than-life paintings, mostly of Black children playing. It was called "The Power of Community."
Byrdsong Williams stopped in front of one canvas, of a child crouched on a ledge, seemingly getting ready to jump. The painting, by Lamar Whidbee, was titled "Leap of Faith I."
"I love that," she murmured, reading the title aloud. "Those are some words that I feel right now."
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