Inclusion in Retreat

What Emerging Leaders Must Understand About DEI Amid Corporate Retreat and Cultural Disruption

Today, emerging leaders are stepping into organisations at a moment of contradiction. On paper, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) has never been more discussed. Yet in practice, inclusion feels increasingly fragile, especially for women of colour in the UK and the United States.

According to McKinsey & Company and LeanIn.org’s Women in the Workplace research, progress for women of colour has stalled or reversed at critical transition points. Black, Asian and Latina women remain the most under represented group in management, face the highest rates of microaggressions and are least likely to receive sponsorship.

At the same time, public narratives around DEI have shifted. High-profile figures such as Donald Trump and Elon Musk have reframed DEI as ideological, divisive or unnecessary, emboldening corporate hesitation and quiet retreat.

For emerging leaders, this is not an abstract debate. It is the environment you are inheriting.

DEI as Power, Politics and Profit Collide

Reni Eddo-Lodge remains one of the clearest voices on why inclusion fails when those least affected by inequality dominate the conversation.

Her work challenges leaders to recognise that silence is not a neutral act, avoiding conversations about race actively protects existing power structures and allows inequity to persist unchallenged. She reminds us that systems do not emerge in a vacuum.

History shapes how organisations operate today and without understanding how inequality was constructed, leaders cannot hope to dismantle it. Central to her argument is the uneven distribution of emotional labour, where women of colour are repeatedly expected to educate others, absorb bias and perform resilience while continuing to deliver at a high level.

The leadership lesson is uncomfortable but essential. Inclusion is not driven by good intentions or empathy alone. It demands a conscious redistribution of power, influence and decision-making authourity, moving beyond listening sessions and awareness workshops toward structural change that alters who holds authourity and whose voices genuinely shape outcomes.

Why the Business of DEI Has Not Delivered Results

Award-winning journalist and author Pamela Newkirk exposes an uncomfortable truth in Diversity, Inc. Organisations across the public and private sectors have invested billions in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, yet the underlying distribution of power, reward and opportunity has barely shifted.

DEI has too often been treated as a reputational exercise rather than an operational one, designed to signal values externally while leaving internal systems largely untouched. When inclusion is framed as branding instead of business architecture, progress stalls almost immediately.

This pattern is visible not only in corporations, but also within institutions that publicly champion equality, including the National Health Service.

The NHS regularly promotes itself as one of the most diverse employers in the UK and its workforce statistics support that claim at entry and mid-levels. However, equity tells a different story.

Race and gender pay gaps persist across NHS trusts, with Black and minority ethnic women disproportionately concentrated in lower-paid roles and significantly under represented at senior and executive levels. Despite extensive DEI statements and frameworks, progression into decision-making positions remains uneven and slow.

Pension outcomes further expose the gap between inclusion rhetoric and lived reality. Women of colour are more likely to occupy lower-paid, less secure roles and experience stalled progression, they accumulate smaller pensions over time. This creates a long-term financial penalty that DEI initiatives rarely address, despite their stated focus on fairness and wellbeing. Inclusion that does not account for lifetime earnings, pension security and leadership access is incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

Newkirk’s analysis helps explain why these gaps persist. DEI efforts fail when representation increases without corresponding authourity, when accountability remains symbolic rather than embedded in leadership incentives and when success is measured by visibility instead of influence. In systems like the NHS, this results in diverse workforces delivering essential services while strategic decisions, resource allocation and long-term power remain concentrated at the top.

Her work complements Reni Eddo-Lodge’s critique by showing how institutions can fluently adopt the language of inclusion while quietly resisting the redistribution of opportunity that true equity requires.

Who Reframed the DEI Narrative

The last decade has reshaped diversity, equity and inclusion in ways that go far beyond internal policy failures. To understand the current moment, emerging leaders must place today’s DEI backlash in historical context.

After the global racial reckoning of 2020, organisations across the UK and United States made highly visible commitments to equity, appointing DEI leaders, publishing targets and signalling long-term change. Yet by 2023–2025, that momentum collided with a counter-narrative that reframed inclusion as ideological excess rather than organisational necessity.

The impact has been measurable. In the United States alone, labour force data in early 2025 showed that more than 300,000 Black women left the workforce in a single quarter, one of the sharpest exits since the early pandemic period. This was not simply an economic fluctuation. It reflected a collapse in trust, safety and belief that workplaces would protect or progress women of colour once political and cultural winds shifted.

Inside organisations, the emotional impact was immediate. As major corporations quietly dismantled DEI teams, paused equity initiatives or removed inclusion language from strategy documents, employees described feeling exposed and expendable.

Women of colour spoke of being encouraged for years to mentor, lead culture work and “bring their whole selves,” only to watch those commitments evaporate when DEI became politically inconvenient. The sense was not just disappointment but betrayal. Inclusion, it became clear, had been conditional on silence from powerful critics and compliance with a new cultural mood shaped by anti-DEI rhetoric linked to DOGE-style libertarian ideology and the broader political narratives associated with Donald Trump and Elon Musk. Companies did not merely retreat, they recalibrated to appease power.

This narrative shift was not constructive disruption. It did not lead to better-designed systems, clearer accountability or more rigorous debate about what works in inclusion. Instead, DEI was reframed as a liability rather than a performance driver. By casting equity as ideological, organisations gave themselves permission to step back without replacing DEI with alternative structures that protect fairness, progression or pay equity. The cost of that reframing has been borne disproportionately by women of colour, who already face higher scrutiny, weaker sponsorship and greater penalties for error.

The role of social media in accelerating this shift cannot be understated. When control of major platforms sits with individuals who openly question or ridicule DEI, the impact ripples far beyond online discourse.

Anti-DEI narratives become amplified, simplified and normalised as common sense or “merit defence.” Nuance disappears. Structural inequality is reduced to opinion. For leaders and boards, this creates a chilling effect. Silence feels safer than principled leadership. Retreat feels pragmatic rather than regressive. Yet the long-term danger is profound. When social media power reshapes what is ‘sayable’, organisations begin managing optics instead of outcomes, fear instead of fairness.

What has changed the DEI narrative most is not a single policy decision but a convergence of political rhetoric, tech-platform influence and corporate risk aversion. The result is a paradoxical workplace where diverse talent is still expected to perform, innovate and lead through complexity, while the systems that ensure equity, belonging and progression are quietly dismantled.

For emerging leaders, recognising that this shift was neither neutral nor inevitable is essential. The reframing of DEI was not a constructive evolution. It was a destabilising retreat that weakened trust, hollowed out accountability and left many women of colour concluding that leaving was safer than staying.

Why Inclusion Still Does Not Feel Real for Women of Colour

The data from Women in the Workplace, produced by McKinsey & Company in partnership with LeanIn.org, is consistent, longitudinal and deeply sobering. Year after year, it shows that women of colour face the steepest drop-off at the very first rung of leadership.

The transition from individual contributor to manager. This early bottleneck has a compounding effect. When women of colour are filtered out at the start of the pipeline, they are mathematically less likely to reach senior leadership, executive roles or board positions, regardless of talent or performance. What is often framed as a “pipeline problem” is, in reality, a systems failure.

That failure becomes even more visible at board level. In both the UK and the United States, women’s representation on boards has improved in headline terms, yet women of colour remain significantly underrepresented.

In the UK, progress driven by targets and reporting requirements has largely benefited white women, while Black and minority ethnic women occupy only a small fraction of board seats. In the US, women of colour hold a single-digit percentage of Fortune 500 board roles, despite decades of DEI commitments. Presence, where it exists, is often symbolic rather than influential. Many women of colour who reach these spaces describe being highly visible yet marginalised, invited into the room without access to the informal power, networks or sponsorship that shape real decisions.

Inside organisations, this pattern mirrors everyday leadership experience. Women of colour report higher exposure to microaggressions and identity-based scrutiny, alongside lower access to senior sponsors who actively advocate for their advancement. Mistakes are judged more harshly, credibility is more frequently questioned and performance standards are quietly raised.

The psychological toll of this imbalance is significant. Many describe being “the only one” in leadership meetings, carrying responsibility without authourity and visibility without safety. This is not inclusion as lived experience, it is endurance.

These realities explain why inclusion often feels performative rather than real.

While organisations celebrate diversity statistics, awards and board appointments, the underlying dynamics of power, sponsorship and trust remain unchanged. For women of colour, inclusion cannot be measured by presence alone. It is felt through progression, influence and protection from disproportionate risk.

Until systems are redesigned to address these structural gaps, inclusion will continue to exist more convincingly in reports and press releases than in the day-to-day reality of leadership for women of colour.

How Some Companies Are Adapting, Not Retreating

Despite the backlash, some organisations are choosing evolution over retreat by treating inclusion as operating infrastructure rather than optional language. The difference is not in whether they publish a statement, but whether they hard-wire inclusion into how talent is hired, developed, measured and retained and whether they keep enough transparency for employees to trust the direction of travel. This is where the most credible approaches are emerging: not “DEI as performance,” but inclusion as a measurable system that shapes outcomes across teams, products and communities.

Google is a useful case study precisely because it shows both sides of this moment. The ambition, the capability and the tension. In its 2024 Diversity Annual Report, Google explicitly links diverse perspectives to creativity and innovation, framing belonging as inseparable from building products “for everyone.” 

Yet the current environment has also pushed Google to adjust its approach. Reporting has shown Google ended its DEI hiring goals and began reviewing DEI-related programmes, citing legal and compliance pressures in the United States. That combination matters for emerging leaders to study. It illustrates how even companies with mature inclusion narratives may shift tactics under pressure and why employees judge sincerity less by the brand story and more by whether opportunities, promotions and leadership pathways remain protected when the political temperature rises.

What “adapting” can look like in practice is shifting from broad training and pledges to systems that actually change behaviour. Clearer promotion criteria, more consistent performance calibration and leadership accountability tied to retention and progression, not just recruitment optics. It also means protecting the informal engine of advancement. Sponsorship.

Mentorship can help people navigate a system, but sponsorship changes a person’s trajectory because it involves advocacy when decisions are made behind closed doors. When companies keep that infrastructure intact, even while adapting language or governance, employees experience less of the “inclusion whiplash” that drives disengagement and exits.

Vodafone’s education work offers a different, equally important lens. Inclusion as access, not branding. Through the Vodafone Foundation’s Instant Schools for Africa, educational materials are delivered digitally via mobile networks, with learning resources made available without mobile data charges in participating countries, explicitly designed to remove cost barriers that exclude children from learning.

The Instant Schools for Africa campaign is one of the Vodafone Foundation’s largest philanthropic education initiatives. It was launched to give millions of young people across several African countries free access to high‑quality digital learning materials, even in communities with limited connectivity.

In parallel, Vodafone Foundation’s Instant Network Schools / Instant Classroom approach, developed with UNHCR for refugee settings, has used digital classroom kits and connectivity to support refugee education, with reporting noting 86,500 refugee students reached at one point and a stated ambition to help half a million refugee students by 2025. The leadership lesson here is that inclusion is not only internal workforce policy,  it is also the design of access itself. When companies invest in educational infrastructure that widens participation, they are shaping future talent pipelines and community capability in a way that goes beyond corporate slogans.

Taken together, these examples show what it means to adapt without abandoning the point. The organisations most likely to keep credibility are the ones that build inclusion into the mechanics. How talent is evaluated, how progression is sponsored, how transparency is maintained and how access is expanded for the communities they serve. DEI survives not through language, but through infrastructure, and employees can tell the difference immediately.

From Rhetoric to Reality: When Inclusion Is Tested, Leadership Is Revealed

You are stepping into leadership at a moment when diversity, equity and inclusion are being questioned more loudly than at any point in the last decade. Yet the evidence, across sectors and geographies, remains consistent. Fair systems outperform performative ones.

Organisations that embed equity into governance, leadership accountability, talent progression and pay structures retain talent for longer, reduce burnout and innovate more effectively. Those that treat DEI as branding, risk management or ideology experience disengagement, stalled pipelines and reputational fragility when cultural pressure rises.

What this era demands of emerging leaders is clarity. The challenge is not to defend DEI as a slogan or to rehearse its moral case. The challenge is to translate inclusion into operating reality. Equitable promotion pathways, transparent pay and pension outcomes, credible sponsorship, psychological safety and leadership behaviours that do not disappear when scrutiny increases. This is where concepts such as inclusive leadership, systemic equity, organisational culture, workforce sustainability and leadership accountability move from theory into practice.

For women of colour in particular, inclusion is not measured by representation alone, whether on boards, in senior management or in public-facing roles. It is measured by influence, progression, safety and longevity. When organisations fail to address race and gender pay gaps, pension disparities, sponsorship deficits and biased evaluation systems, inclusion remains rhetorical. When they address these issues structurally, inclusion becomes lived.

For emerging leaders in the UK and the United States, this is the defining leadership test of the moment. The future of work will be shaped not by how loudly organisations speak about DEI, but by how rigorously they design fair systems that withstand political pressure, cultural backlash and economic uncertainty.

Building equitable workplaces is not about asking individuals to be endlessly resilient. It is about creating leadership models, governance structures and cultures where people can thrive because the system is fair. That is the real work of leadership now and it is where credibility, performance and trust will ultimately be won or lost.

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If this reflects your lived experience, you are not alone. Share this with others navigating leadership in complex systems and contribute your insight in the comments so we continue learning, challenging and building together.