Your Job May Be Secure

But How Much of Your Power Still Belongs to Your Employer?

For years, DEI was treated as something that lived inside HR. A diversity director, an employee network, a leadership programme, a recruitment target, a supplier initiative. That made it easy to argue about DEI as ideology rather than see it for what it actually is. An economic ecosystem of jobs, contracts, sponsorship, procurement, progression and access.

That distinction matters now, especially for senior Black women and women of colour who did everything the workplace told them would lead to security. They got qualified, delivered results, built credibility, mentored others and took on more responsibility. For many, that security no longer feels secure.

The political weaponisation of DEI in the US under Donald Trump, combined with Elon Musk's role in DOGE-driven federal workforce cuts, has shown how fast political rhetoric becomes organisational behaviour. Executive action hits federal agencies and contractors directly. From there, risk assessments change, budgets move and language quietly disappears from websites.

This rhetoric travelled through recruitment, consulting, procurement and leadership development. But at the same time, AI is reshaping roles and which expertise organisations value. For women already navigating unequal progression and sponsorship, these two shifts aren't happening separately. They are converging.

The real question is not whether DEI survives. It is what happens economically when the infrastructure built around inclusion contracts and how much of your career security depends on infrastructure you do not control.

The Job Losses We Can See May Not Be the Biggest Story

The data is worth sitting with. According to the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR), Black women's employment fell by roughly 251,000 between January and August 2025. Some of that recovered, but by December there were still about 113,000 fewer Black women employed than at the start of the year. At the worst points, Black women accounted for 54.7% of all job losses among women despite making up just 14.1% of the female workforce.

None of this means every job loss traces directly to DEI cuts. The economy is messier than that. The better question is why Black women are so disproportionately exposed when institutions restructure and what disappears alongside the roles themselves.

Part of the answer is occupational concentration. Black women are heavily represented in government, education, health and social care, sectors now being restructured. But another part sits somewhere we rarely measure, the DEI supply chain.

A DEI budget does not just fund a diversity executive. It funds recruiters, consultants, coaches, trainers, minority suppliers, professional networks and community organisations. It funds the leadership programmes through which people gain sponsorship and visibility and the procurement routes through which businesses gain access to corporate contracts.

Cut the budget at the top and the consequences travel far beyond the department whose name was on the org chart, to the consultant whose contract is not renewed, the community organisation whose funding is reduced, the supplier whose route into procurement narrows.

There is a third, slower cost, too. The woman who never receives the sponsorship, stretch assignment or introduction that might have changed her trajectory will not show up in any statistic. That may be the real story, the one we are not tracking at all.

It is worth being precise about what the data does and does not show. 

Federal employment overall fell by roughly 277,000 in 2025, a decline driven by budget cuts, hiring freezes and broader economic conditions that had nothing to do with DEI programmes specifically. Some of Black women's job losses sit inside that wider contraction, not inside DEI cuts alone. 

The stronger, more defensible claim is not  "DEI rollback caused these losses"  it is that Black women are consistently the first and hardest hit whenever institutions restructure, for whatever reason, because of where they sit occupationally and how thin their margin for institutional protection already was. That pattern holds whether the cause is DEI retrenchment, federal downsizing or a recession, which is precisely why the argument for building portable power does not depend on proving DEI cuts were the cause.

Political Rhetoric Has Become Economic Infrastructure

Trump's significance here is not  that he criticises DEI, it is that his administration has used federal power to challenge DEI programmes and practices, including at contractors and subcontractors. Musk's DOGE-driven restructuring made rapid federal workforce reduction one of the most visible features of the administration's first year.

Neither fact means Trump or Musk personally caused any individual's job loss. But together they demonstrate something leaders and professionals should take seriously. Institutions can change direction far faster than careers can.

A woman can spend twenty years building expertise inside an institution whose priorities shift in twenty weeks. Much of what she has accumulated, reputation, relationships, credibility, influence does not automatically travel with her when that institution changes course. The title, the email database, the platform, the programme. These belong to the employer, not to her. The same risk applies to founders and consultants who are, in effect, concentrated in a single client, funder or procurement programme. What looks like growth can quietly be concentration risk.

What does travel is portable capital. Expertise, reputation, external relationships, IP, financial resilience and the ability to explain your value without your job title doing it for you.

Britain Should Not Assume This Is an American Story

The Equality Act 2010 has not gone anywhere and UK employers remain bound by it. But most major employers operate globally. Budgets, leadership structures and procurement decisions cross borders, so American political shifts do not need to change British law before they start shaping British corporate behaviour.

The retreat here may simply be quieter. An unfilled vacancy, a specialist function absorbed into HR, a supplier programme broadened until its original purpose disappeared, representation targets dropped from a report, language shifting from "equity" to "talent" or "culture" without anyone calling it a rollback. If organisations stop measuring ethnicity, pay and progression with precision, inequality becomes harder to see, challenge or correct, which is exactly why that measurement matters more now, not less.

 If Institutional Infrastructure Weakens, What Replaces It?

Institutions should still be held accountable for fair recruitment, pay and progression, that work is not optional. But it cannot be the only strategy available to Black women and women of colour. If formal sponsorship becomes less reliable, external relationships matter more. If corporate leadership programmes contract, independent development becomes more valuable. If employment becomes less predictable, commercial capability matters more.

AI compounds this. As roles are redesigned and certain expertise is automated, the danger is not  technological displacement or DEI retreat alone, it is both happening at once, at the exact moment fewer institutional mechanisms exist to notice the unequal outcomes.

This is not an argument that institutions get to abandon responsibility while individuals "build resilience." It's the opposite: keep demanding structural fairness, while refusing to make your economic future entirely dependent on institutions delivering it.

Organise Your Power, Not Just Your Time

That is the case for Power Keys to an Organised Life. For a Black woman or woman of colour navigating leadership or entrepreneurship, organisation is now inseparable from agency.

When your diary is full, your network has gone cold, your achievements are undocumented and every hour is consumed by today's demands, there is no strategic space left to notice tomorrow's changes before they arrive.

The advantage will not go to whoever works hardest because many women have already proven that capability many times over.

It will go to whoever can see change early, identify which parts of their value are portable and strengthen relationships before they are needed. That work is easiest to do before the crisis while a contract is still active, while a sponsor is still in the building, while there's still time to convert institutional access into something that outlasts it.

This is not  another list of tasks. It's the strategic space to decide which responsibilities still deserve you and which dependencies you've been mistaking for security.

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The real DEI question now is not  "is DEI dead?" it is whether enough economic, professional and collective power is being built to make sure progress doesn't disappear along with the infrastructure that supports it.

The next chapter of DEI is not  only about persuading institutions to keep the door open, it is about making sure enough portable power exists that the future doesn't depend entirely on who controls the door.

Share this post with a woman who has spent years helping build other people's organisations. It may be time she is just as organised around building her own.