Meta is halting lots of its diversity and inclusion efforts and telling employees that they are not any longer required to interview candidates from underrepresented backgrounds for open positions or to hunt business from diverse suppliers.
The notice to employees, shared verbally with Bloomberg News, represents a big setback to the corporate's diversity, equity and inclusion priorities. Maxine Williams, Meta's chief diversity officer and highest-ranking Black woman, can be reassigned to a brand new role , the memo says.
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Axios previously reported the news, which a Meta spokesperson confirmed.
Meta also updated its policies on Tuesday about what form of content it could possibly remove from its sites. Those changes included latest provisions that allow users to sometimes use offensive language “when discussing transgender rights, immigration or homosexuality” and to advocate for gender or sexual orientation-based restrictions in military, law enforcement and teaching jobs .
The latest policy also removed protections against language describing women as “household objects or property,” in addition to dehumanizing language that focuses on Black, transgender and non-binary people.
Meta joins corporations like Walmart Inc. and McDonald's Corp in retreating from DEI policies. After the Supreme Court banned affirmative motion in college admissions, legal challenges to corporate diversity programs geared toward promoting underrepresented groups have prompted executives to review the initiatives. Trump, a vocal critic of DEI policies, has vowed to stamp out the federal government's efforts.
Meta was a majority Asian company in 2023, with 51% Asian and 36% white, based on Bloomberg evaluation of information the corporate reports annually to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The proportion of black and Hispanic staff has declined barely since 2020, at 3.5% and 6%, respectively. Meta saw the most important decline in Black managers amongst 84 S&P 100 corporations from 2022 to 2023.
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