Risks of retreat: The path forward

2. Mitigate risk and maximize impact

Once leaders have assessed risk from all angles, they need to decide what modifications (if any) should be made to their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

Mitigate risk

Importantly, just because a specific program presents risks does not mean it needs to be abandoned or modified. The decision often depends on the program’s impact. A program that is achieving tangible success in alignment with organizational values and business goals¹ may lead an organization to accept higher legal risk. In contrast, a high-risk but low-impact program may suggest the program is not worth retaining.

If leaders alter a program, they can consider doing so in line with the following shifts, which reduce legal risk under each of the three Ps while preserving the potential for meaningful impact:

3. Walk the talk and talk the walk

After assessing risk and modifying programs as necessary, leaders also need to ensure their communication strategy is aligned with their actions.

Walk the talk

First, leaders need to “walk the talk,” which means matching their actions to their espoused values.³ While our survey shows that leaders hold positive views of their current and future commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion, they must be careful not to tout this optimistic view without ensuring that the practice on the ground matches the rhetoric. Specifically, they should ensure that:

• Diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations are indeed embedded into everyday workplace practices, such as recruitment, mentorship, work assignment, performance evaluation, and promotion processes. This could be accomplished by, for example:
  • Expanding outreach and leveraging new approaches to reach a more diverse talent pool.
  • Weaving core principles and behaviors like respect, empathy, courageous communication, and inclusion into leadership expectations.
  • Offering training and accountability mechanisms that enable core principles and behaviors to be embedded across the organization.
  • Auditing hiring and performance evaluation processes to identify and remove stereotypical assessment criteria.
• Budgets and personnel for diversity, equity, and inclusion are robust and in line with leaders’ avowed “investment” and “commitment” to the work.
• Existing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs are not shuttered or substantively reconfigured unless there is compelling reason to do so based on a holistic risk assessment. If changes are deemed necessary, they should be tailored to address only the specific areas of heightened risk.

Any disconnect between espoused values and organizational action puts organizations at risk of being seen as performative or disingenuous. This perception would have considerable negative implications for employee⁴ and consumer sentiment.

Talk the walk

Second, leaders need to “talk the walk,” which means clearly and consistently articulating what their organization is doing — and why — with respect to diversity, equity, and inclusion to drive shared understanding and collective buy-in. Recognizing, for example, that some approaches most employees support may be legally problematic, it is essential that leaders explain the rationale behind strategic shifts, including differentiating between compliance-based decisions and strategy-based ones. If leaders effectively “talk the walk,” they can unlock one of the key benefits of DEI gleaned from our survey, as reflected in a Black Gen X woman’s observation that DEI “offers employees the confidence that our company has their best interest at heart.” One mechanism to support this is to develop a charter that clearly outlines the organization’s approach to supporting all talent, driving inclusion, and ensuring fairness.

As noted earlier, Catalyst has identified three common high-level strategies that organizations adopt when responding to the current DEI landscape: fight, flight, and finesse. Survey data and our experience suggests that most organizations are adopting the “finesse” approach. Without effective communication, however, leaders risk a perception gap in which employees interpret “finesse” as “flight.” As we previously described, our survey revealed several troubling gaps between employee and leader sentiment. Employees are much less likely than C-suite or legal leaders to support a “rebrand” of DEI activities or to believe that DEI is currently “embedded” into everyday workplace practices at their organizations, and are more likely to expect that DEI will become less embedded at their company in the future.

These gaps suggest leaders could do a better job of clarifying what changes they are making to their programs, explaining why those changes are necessary, and underscoring the organization’s ongoing commitment to the values of fairness and equal opportunity in the workplace with specificity around how that commitment is being realized. A lack of clear and persuasive communication allows cynicism to fester, which again has considerable negative implications for employee and consumer sentiment.

4. Take the big picture view

Once leaders have completed a risk assessment, modified programs (as necessary) in accordance with that assessment, and aligned their communications and actions to their strategy, we recommend that leaders stay the course and avoid reacting too swiftly to the local political and social currents of the day. The path toward fairer, more inclusive, and more diverse workplaces has never been linear. To make strategic and sustainable long-term decisions, leaders should take a “big picture” view in two respects: temporal and global.

Take a long-term view

Starting with the temporal, we acknowledge that the legal and social environment for diversity, equity, and inclusion work has changed dramatically in the space of just five years — from tremendous pressure to conduct the work after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 to tremendous pressure to retreat in 2025. Similar swings have happened before in US history, such as the backlash following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the backlash to affirmative action in the 1980s. This moment, too, will pass.

Our survey results underscore that the values that caused the upswing in attention to diversity, equity, and inclusion in 2020 endure. Significant majorities of employees in organizations with DEI programs support those programs, and there is near universal support for many of the values that underpin diversity, equity, and inclusion practices. Indeed, panning out to take a more “temporally distant” view highlights that the zeitgeist could easily swing back in favor of DEI — or whatever alternative term organizations choose to adopt. In our survey, Millennials and Gen Z professionals are significantly more supportive of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives than Baby Boomers, suggesting that over time, the pressure to maintain and expand DEI programs may increase.

Take a global view

Taking the big picture view also means considering global trends. Our survey was limited to employees in the United States, which prevents us from reporting on data regarding DEI programs abroad. However, many leaders — 46% of our sample — work in organizations that have offices and operations in multiple countries.

In many regions of the world — including Australia, Canada, the UK, and Western Europe — organizations continue to advance fairness and equal opportunity at work, even as the legal and social landscape in the United States becomes more restrictive. For example, the European Union's “Gender Balance on Corporate Boards Directive” requires member states to adopt binding measures to advance women’s representation on corporate boards.⁵ The EU Pay Transparency Directive, set to take effect in 2026, mandates comprehensive evaluations of compensation packages alongside public disclosure of findings, job applicant salary transparency, and various enforcement measures.⁶ In 2025, the Australian Parliament passed a new law requiring employers with 500 or more employees to adopt and make measurable progress toward achieving gender equality targets.⁷ Organizations that react hastily to US developments by pulling back from diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts may:

• Reduce cohesion in the organization’s global brand identity and communications strategy.
• Damage the workplace culture as employees, especially those that routinely interact across borders, perceive the US entity as significantly out of step with global counterparts.

As organizations navigate both the temporal and geographical complexities of this work, we urge leaders to resist the pressure to set their diversity, equity, and inclusion strategy based on the local politics of the moment. Of course, current US pressures around diversity, equity, and inclusion require innovation and adaptation. But the organizations that succeed long term will be those that ground their strategy in organizational values and the practices that decades of research and implementation have shown drive results.

Employees who have direct experience with DEI affirmed these strategies