Affirmative action for white men

Since taking office on January 20, President Donald Trump has targeted so-called "diversity, equity, and inclusion" programs, also known as DEI. According to a January 21 executive order, "critical and influential institutions of American society, including the Federal Government, major corporations, financial institutions, the medical industry, large commercial airlines, law enforcement agencies, and institutions of higher education have adopted and actively use dangerous, demeaning, and immoral race- and sex-based preferences" under the guise of DEI. These programs, according to Trump and his administration, "undermine our national unity, as they deny, discredit, and undermine the traditional American values of hard work, excellence, and individual achievement in favor of an unlawful, corrosive, and pernicious identity-based spoils system."

The executive order suggests there is pervasive discrimination against hard-working white men, who are being replaced by less-qualified women and minorities. This point was made explicitly last October by Darren Beattie, who was just hired for a senior State Department role by the Trump administration. "Competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work," Beattie wrote in a post on X. "Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men."

Beattie was fired from his job at Duke University in 2018 for attending a white nationalist convention.

The executive order claims that corporate DEI programs constitute "illegal discrimination." The executive order mandates that each federal agency "shall identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations" into large corporations or non-profit groups for implementing DEI programs.

This legal analysis is flawed. In Students for Fair Admissions, the Supreme Court ruled that race-based affirmative action programs in college admissions are illegal. But Students for Fair Admissions does not have any impact on corporations because affirmative action in employment situations, in almost all circumstances, is already illegal. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 banned the consideration of race in hiring. Corporate DEI programs involve "expanding outreach for new hires, creating employee resource groups for underrepresented workers, and reducing bias in hiring through such practices as 'blind' applications."

The push to eliminate DEI is effectively affirmative action for white men, eliminating programs that help corporations attract and retain qualified minorities and women.

Beyond the flawed legal analysis, however, is an empirical question: Is corporate America biased against white people? Are white people being shut out of desirable jobs to accommodate an influx of racial minorities? According to the latest data, the answer to these questions is an emphatic "no."

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Women and minorities are severely underrepresented in corporate America

The reality is, even with diversity efforts, women and minorities remain badly underrepresented in corporate America.

According to a 2024 report by McKinsey, women have made modest gains in the workplace over the last 10 years. But at the current rate of progress, McKinsey projected that it will take 22 years for white women and 48 years for women of color to attain the same level of representation in senior leadership roles as they have in the general population.

The number of women in executive positions has jumped from 17% in 2015 to 29% in 2024. While this is a significant gain, the report found that much of it was due to companies eliminating positions historically held by men and hiring women for new support roles in legal, HR, and IT departments. Companies cannot continue adding such positions indefinitely, so the gains women made are not sustainable. Additionally, the study found that women are less likely to get hired to entry-level positions than men and less likely to get their first promotion.

The representation of Black people in the workforce has seen little to no improvement since DEI initiatives gained traction in 2020, based on a Bloomberg analysis of data that 84 top U.S. companies provided to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2023.

The proportion of Black employees at these 84 companies reached a peak in 2021 at 17%, but has been on the decline since. Twenty-six percent of all jobs cut by these companies in 2023 were held by Black employees. Among the 84 companies, which are more diverse than the US workforce as a whole, the share of Black people in senior leadership roles decreased at more than half since 2020.

While white men saw their representation in executive positions and the workforce overall decrease, they are still overrepresented in higher paying positions, making up 46% of executive roles and 37% of managers, but less than a third of the workforce of the companies analyzed by Bloomberg.

While corporate boards have made some progress in increasing representation of women and minorities in recent years, the upward trend is slowing, according to a 2024 report by the Conference Board. Gender and racial diversity “reached record levels in 2024,” but “the proportion of new directors who are women or from non-White backgrounds has declined since a high in 2022.”

While women now make up 34% of directors in the S&P 500 and 29% in the Russell 3000, they are still vastly underrepresented, as women make up “47% of all U.S. employees” and 50.5% of the population. In 2024, women only made up 11% of board chairs in the S&P 500 and 8% in the Russell 3000.

In 2024, there were slightly more minority directors and board chairs compared to 2020. But the number of newly hired Black, LGBTQ, and non-white women directors fell since 2022. The number of new white directors significantly increased, reaching 69% in both indexes. The report notes that the decreasing trends may “signal some waning of momentum in corporate diversity initiatives amid heightened political and social scrutiny.”