What happens in the US doesn’t stay in the US.
As President Donald Trump wages war on corporate diversity initiatives, European companies must decide where they stand. Those with US ties are under pressure to either scale back their commitments or quietly rebrand them to protect lucrative contracts with American businesses.
Just days after taking office, Trump banned federal agencies and contractors from having diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) targets — blaming these programs for “public waste” and “shameful discrimination”.
Many large US corporations — including Goldman Sachs, Walmart, McDonald’s and Meta — swiftly dismantled policies that they had previously presented as a core part of their identity. Others such as Apple initially resisted such demands before falling into line.
Designed to combat systemic discrimination based on ethnicity, gender and other protected characteristics, DEI practices have been commonplace in American corporations since the early 2000s, migrating later to Europe — though never quite at the same scale. Besides hiring targets for women and ethnic minorities, they can include measures such as longer paternity leave, removing a structural barrier for women in the job market.
DEI initiatives have come under criticism in recent years, with opponents arguing that measures to boost certain groups actively discriminate against others. In 2023, the US Supreme Court struck down “affirmative action” in college admissions programmes, which followed a similar logic. In the corporate world, dozens of companies have faced discrimination lawsuits in the US over their DEI practices.
Europe’s dilemma
European workplaces are highly exposed to any changes in US corporate culture, both through local subsidiaries of American companies and through the US’s general cultural influence in Europe.
“Most of our management practices are inspired by America,” Smaranda Boros, a management professor at Vlerick Business School in Brussels, told The Parliament. American companies with big operations in Europe are “feeling the strongest pressure from Trump’s new policies to end DEI programmes”.
Fewer European companies have announced plans to abandon DEI programs altogether. Among them is British pharmaceutical giant GSK, which said in late February that it would pause all diversity programs; its largest client is the US government. This month, Swiss bank UBS dropped annual diversity targets, shifting its focus to “meritocracy.”
But more is happening behind the scenes. Companies wary of backlash are already distancing themselves from the charged term. Instead, they are adopting more neutral language or embedding diversity efforts within broader corporate programs, fearing that a strong stance in favour of DEI could jeopardise lucrative contracts with US businesses or draw unwanted scrutiny to their subsidiaries across the Atlantic.
An informal memo from within a European multinational with operations in the US, seen by The Parliament, revealed that the company had quietly removed the words “diverse” and “diversity” from its language. The phrase “diversity is a fundamental value” was scrapped entirely, while a statement about “welcoming diverse opinions of stakeholders” was reworded into a more neutral reference to “consulting external stakeholders.”
Nevertheless, some companies appear to be trying to quietly stand by their DEI commitments. A former employee of a large US auditing company told The Parliament that a senior person at the firm had said that the move away from DEI was “just posturing” and that inclusion work would continue in Europe — just out of the spotlight.
Each firm’s approach will depend largely on its management’s own view of DEI, according to a senior executive at a Brussels-based trade association, who requested anonymity for fear of repercussions from his American members. “Companies that never supported DEI felt free to abandon it entirely,” he said, whereas “those committed to the cause are now keeping a low profile, rebranding their initiatives to stay under the radar.”
Tamara Makoni, a Brussels-based consultant advising large organisations to become more inclusive, believes that any backtracking will harm companies’ credibility. “Imagine putting that effort in — talking to employees, getting them on board — and then suddenly you say: ‘It is not a priority anymore.’ Any sort of trust that you have established with your employees will be destroyed,” she said.
And Boros believes that even a rebranding of DEI efforts will likely make them less effective, regardless of the intent: “Research shows that accountability and public reporting is one of the most useful ways to counteract implicit bias," she said.
EU regulatory power
When it comes to the regulatory environment, the European Commission remains a staunch advocate of gender equality, and unveiled a new gender equality strategy ahead of International Women’s Day earlier this month.
“We have felt this pushback coming from across the Atlantic, but we have this roadmap precisely to ensure we remain on the right side of progress,” EU Commissioner for Equality, Crisis Management, and Preparedness Hadja Lahbib told reporters in Brussels on the day of the unveiling.
Still, EU laws promoting gender equality often lack the strength to counterbalance companies' fear of falling out of favour with the Trump administration.
Anti-discrimination policies in the EU are largely the preserve of national governments, which may take a different direction to Brussels. In late March, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán banned Pride marches, revoking a right the LGBTQ+ community had held for over 30 years.
There is also a growing intellectual trend against the ideology behind DEI initiatives. The Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC) Brussels, the European branch of a Hungarian government-funded think tank, has been hosting conferences protesting against what it calls the “”.
There are some indications that a culture shift is beginning to take hold. A Brussels-based communication officer told The Parliament that her association scrapped the idea of a gender-focused communication campaign, arguing the topic was just “no longer in fashion.”
Companies and other organisations in favour of DEI are pushing back. Georgia Brooks, the founder of The Nine, a women-only members’ club in Brussels, said that corporate membership applications are up. “Some of them were hesitant for years, but they all recognise that now is the time to act,” she said.
A European DEI model?
To some extent, DEI practices are themselves a cultural import from the US. Now, with the rapid change of direction in Washington, European policymakers and businesses can go their own way.
“Europe has borrowed the race conversation from the US” rather than debating within the local context, Boros said. "We still haven't had, at a societal level, some very uncomfortable conversations about systemic injustices that have been perpetuated over centuries.”
Makoni, the consultant, said her clients often asked for tailored programmes that better reflected the European social fabric instead of replicating practices conceived with the US system in mind.
While it’s important to “understand what’s happening in America, it doesn’t have to determine what happens over here,” Makoni said. “This is really the time to decide what our values are as a society and follow that path — no matter what’s going on elsewhere.”
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