Accenture has scrapped its global diversity and inclusion goals after an evaluation of the U.S. political landscape, the Financial Times reported on Friday, citing a memo to the company’s staff from CEO Julie Sweet.
The company will start “sunsetting” the diversity goals it set in 2017, along with career development programs for “people of specific demographic groups”, the report said.
Accenture, which hires extensively from India, did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.
The report also quoted Sweet as saying that the change followed an “evaluation of our internal policies and practices and the evolving landscape in the United States, including recent executive orders with which we must comply”. Big Tech companies Meta, Alphabet and Amazon are among a slew of companies that scrapped their DEI goals leading up to and after Republican Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency.
Since taking office on Jan. 20, Trump has issued a series of
executive orders
aimed at dismantling DEI programs across the federal government and the private sector.
Along with rolling back Accenture’s DEI targets — which Sweet said would no longer be used to measure staff performance — the company will no longer submit data to external diversity benchmarking surveys, the report said.
Accenture would also evaluate external partnerships on the topic “as part of refreshing our talent strategy”, Sweet said in the memo cited in the report.
(Reporting by Rishi Kant in Bengaluru; Editing by Devika Syamnath)
