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JPMorgan Chase is renaming its diversity, equity and inclusion programmes to “diversity, opportunity and inclusion”, as corporate America rushes to adapt to the Trump administration’s backlash against the initiatives.
In an internal memo on Friday, JPMorgan’s chief operations officer Jennifer Piepszak told staff that the bank was “changing ‘equity’ to ‘opportunity’ and renaming our [DEI] organisation to diversity, opportunity and inclusion (DOI) because the ‘e’ always meant equal opportunity to us, not equal outcomes”.
Banks including Goldman Sachs and Citigroup have already scaled back their diversity targets, along with the likes of Accenture and Walt Disney, following political pressure since Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January.
Piepszak said JPMorgan, the largest US bank by assets, regularly reviewed “all of our products and services to be effective and efficient and to keep up with the market, consumer demand and current laws and regulations as they evolve”.
She said the bank, which has more than 300,000 employees, works “to reduce barriers, not standards, because we know that when you reduce standards, nobody wins”. The change was reported earlier by Reuters.
Many companies have operated DEI programmes for decades but there was renewed urgency after the murder of George Floyd by police in 2020 sparked outcry over discrimination against America’s Black population.
However, critics argue that DEI initiatives have meant demography has trumped merit in some hiring decisions. Trump, without citing evidence, blamed DEI policies for a collision between a commercial jet and a military helicopter in January that killed dozens of people just outside Washington.
Trump’s assault on DEI policies has triggered a swift response across the corporate world. More than 200 of America’s largest companies, including Mastercard, Salesforce and Palantir, have culled mentions of DEI and related terms such as “diversity” from their annual reports, according to a Financial Times analysis.
In JPMorgan’s most recent annual report, it changed a section that was previously headlined “Diversity, equity and inclusion” to “Workforce composition”.
