Anti-DEI activists warned ‘go woke, go broke,’ but the data says otherwise

The “go woke, go broke” mantra adopted by the anti-DEI movement seems to have fallen flat, as companies that have maintained their DEI programs and language have not seen their financial performance negatively affected, according to new research from the University of California Berkeley.

Catch up. As DEI efforts surged after the 2020 murder of George Floyd, an anti-DEI coalition formed, picking up steam in 2022 as America First Legal, a far-right nonprofit law firm, funded campaigns and lawsuits against the initiatives. Then came provocateurs like Robby Starbuck, who used social media to pressure companies to back away from DEI. After President Trump took office in January 2025 and signed Executive Order 14173, dozens of companies, from Amazon to Walmart changed their DEI language and publicly distanced themselves from commitments.

Still, DEI has persisted. Some companies didn’t appear to change policy, but simply shifted the language or removed some public references in a move that some experts refer to as “diversity hushing,” HR Brew reported previously. Others, like Costco, Chevron, and Sephora, have doubled-down and kept public-facing DEI efforts the same .

The findings. UC Berkeley analyzed the financial performance of S&P 500 companies before and after President Trump signed Executive Order 14173: Employers like Apple, Costco, and Delta Airlines, which kept their DEI programs, didn’t fare any worse than companies like Target, Walmart, and IBM, which backed away.

Correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but Jacob Grumbach, associate professor at the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley who co-authored the report, said that researchers accounted for this fact. “We do a lot statistically to ensure we’re looking at causation, what it means, the actual causal effect of keeping [DEI] after the executive order relative to firms who either didn’t have it or folded on it, and we do that in a number of ways,” he told HR Brew, adding that they ran abnormal market returns (the difference between expectation, market performance, and how it actually performs), so they could adequately “do a causal apples to apples comparison rather than comparing firms that are not not alike.”

Overall, “it’s pretty clear that consumers are not punishing firms for keeping DEI and may even be rewarding them slightly,” Grumbach told HR Brew.

What’s HR to do? Experts have advised employers to take a wait-and-see approach to changing DEI efforts, in part due to other reports indicating that consumers and companies still support DEI, even if the language they use to describe them has shifted.

Furthermore, the Trump administration has not consistently enforced its executive orders, so how it will treat companies viewed as not compliant is ambiguous, according to Grumbach. “I think it shows that large firms have a lot of leeway to do what they want, potentially more so than American universities,” he said. “There’s still uncertainty about governance and implementation and enforcement of executive branch directives, as well as congressional legislation.”

President Trump’s approval rating has been in free-fall since the start of the US-Israeli war with Iran. According to the latest Economist/YouGov survey, Trump is exiting August with a 33% approval rating, a new low for him in that poll. This could impact how companies act moving forward.

Trump’s unpopularity “has given all of these organizations, but especially large firms and institutional shareholders, more—I wouldn’t necessarily say courage, but there’s not this fear or uncertainty because the administration is not so culturally dominant,” Grumbach said. “They don’t feel that if they take a stance against the administration, that consumers will also throw them under the bus.”