Does DEI matter? The hidden infrastructure behind women’s advancement.

In early 2025, the removal of federal DEI requirements and the rollback of corporate DEI programs dismantled key workplace equity infrastructure. For years, DEI functioned as hidden infrastructure: the audits, reporting channels, training, and leadership pipelines that helped women access fair pay, safe workplaces, and meaningful advancement.

A newly released Women in the Workplace 2025 report shows how quickly the landscape is shifting: companies are cutting DEI staff, reducing career pathways for women, and weakening accountability systems that once helped identify and correct bias.

As these systems disappear across both the public and private sectors, women face new uncertainty in hiring, pay, and career progression — especially in fields where representation gaps already exist.

Why it Matters

DEI wasn’t just a label, it was a structure — a set of tools designed to make workplaces more fair. Across industries, DEI teams and programs supported women by helping to:

• identify and address pay inequities
• improve salary transparency
• reduce bias in hiring and promotion
• build leadership pipelines in male-dominated professions
• provide trusted channels for reporting discrimination or harassment

Without these tools, the burden shifts back to individual women to identify inequities, navigate unclear processes, and advocate for themselves within workplaces that may no longer track or address bias. And the latest data shows what happens when this structure is removed: women receive less sponsorship, fewer stretch assignments, and fewer promotions — especially at the entry level, where inequities compound over the life of a woman’s career.

Because the rollback is happening unevenly — some employers redefining DEI, others abandoning it — women’s prospects now depend more than ever on who they work for and what state-level protections still exist.

Background

In early 2025, the federal government eliminated DEI and affirmative-action requirements across federal workplaces, ending long-standing expectations around pay-equity reviews, inclusive hiring practices, and diversity reporting. Shortly after, major private-sector employers — including Meta, Amazon, Target, Constellation Brands, and IBM — announced reductions or eliminations of their own DEI programs. In many cases, this meant cutting DEI staff, ending leadership development programs, scaling back hiring initiatives, and stopping internal audits that tracked pay and promotion patterns.

According to the Women in the Workplace 2025 report, many companies are quietly walking back transparency practices that were once standard: fewer publish pay-equity data, share promotion rates, or report on representation goals.

All of this reflects a growing tension about what fairness in the workplace should look like. Supporters of the rollback argue that removing DEI restores a merit-based system where opportunities come from individual effort rather than identity-conscious programs. They see DEI as unnecessary, overly bureaucratic, or potentially unfair.

Advocates for DEI counter that these systems were never about preferences — they were about reducing bias, improving transparency, and identifying inequities that otherwise go unaddressed. They warn that without intentional tools, gaps in pay, representation, and advancement will widen, especially for women and women of color.

Regardless of what side you're on, as the DEI infrastructure disappears, women’s experiences will depend far more on individual managers, internal politics, and state-level protections — creating a far less predictable environment for fairness, safety, and advancement.

Resources

Reuters - Boardroom diversity stalls in the face of conservative backlash
Time Magazine - These U.S. Companies Are Not Ditching DEI Amid Trump’s Crackdown
McKinsey & Company - Women in the Workplace 2025