Trump-led DEI crackdown may leave glass ceilings intact

In the “Mad Men” era of the 1960s and 1970s, when my mother was climbing the corporate ladder at C&P Telephone, she was frequently the only woman at out-of-state national technical trainings
for managers.

And from her recollection, if the men in the classes weren’t hitting on her, many were resentful or threatened by her presence and froze her out. She’d often eat meals alone while her male colleagues went out together.

Despite those uncomfortable (and unacceptable) challenges, she rose through the ranks, going on to become a respected regional and East Coast executive at AT&T.

By contrast, over my 30-plus-year career, many of my supervisors and mentors have been women, and it’s not something I ever really thought twice about.

Still, in the 2020s, we’re not that far removed from Don Draper’s world, and plenty of glass ceilings remain unbroken or barely cracked. And standing underneath those ceilings with a hammer can be a lonely place.

On the cover of this month’s issue, we feature our 2025 Virginia Business Black Business Leaders Hall of Fame honoree, Toni Townes-Whitley. As chief executive for Reston-based government contractor SAIC, she is one of just two Black women leading Fortune 500 companies.

As of early 2025, the majority of current Fortune 500 CEOs are white men; eight CEOs are Black and 52 are women.

Similarly, here in Virginia, our annual Virginia 500 power list of the commonwealth’s top executives includes 46 Black leaders and 105 women. When you look at our annual Power 50 list, it is even more clear that white men still hold the top power positions at most of Virginia’s largest corporations, universities and other institutions.

All of this comes amid an ongoing and building backlash to corporate and government DEI initiatives, initiatives, exemplified by President Donald Trump’s Day 1 executive order ending all federal DEI programs.

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd set off a season of corporate soul-searching and mea culpas that turned out to be short-lived.

From the second quarter of 2021 through the third quarter of 2024, references to DEI in quarterly earnings calls plummeted 82%, according to research from market intelligence firm AlphaSense. Major companies from Amazon and Walmart to Meta and McDonald’s have walked back DEI initiatives. Some of this is in response to the real threat of potential “reverse discrimination” lawsuits following the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling against affirmative action in higher education.

And some of it may frankly be a realpolitik acknowledgment of which the way the political winds are blowing, not unlike the way Meta Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced in January he would eliminate fact-checking on Facebook, citing “a cultural tipping point.”

That’s not to say there can’t be reasonable grounds for discussion about merit and credentials. We’re still waiting for a report on the reasons behind Richmond’s four-day water outage in January, which prompted the city’s public utilities director, April Bingham, to resign. During the crisis, conservative news outlets (followed by mainstream media) brought up Bingham’s lack of engineering credentials.

Unlike her counterparts in neighboring localities, Bingham doesn’t have an engineering degree. There’s discussion among some Republican state senators to bring forward a bill to require such credentials, and the city’s new interim director is the state Department of Environmental Quality’s director of water, engineer Anthony “Scott” Morris.

But beyond raising questions about qualifications, some online commenters also made racist remarks. And some alleged that Bingham, a Black woman, was a “DEI hire,” saying she was chosen because of her race and gender — even though she came to Richmond with 20 years of public utilities experience, including overseeing a $33 million meter upgrade project.

This has always been a country fond of swinging between extremes. But we’re also stronger because of the sum of our parts. It seems there is room to find a commonsense, middle-ground solution around diversity and fairness.

But I don’t expect to see it happen anytime soon.