Mark Zuckerberg says corporate culture was ‘neutered’ as Meta scraps DEI

The move was earlier reported by Axios.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is joining a chorus of Silicon Valley leaders who are part of a larger backlash against corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies and efforts to create safer spaces for underrepresented groups. Though the technology industry — including Meta — once praised DEI programs as critical to its success, many top leaders have criticized the programs in recent years, alleging they are responsible for unqualified hires, inflating payrolls and lowering standards across the field.

In an interview with podcaster Joe Rogan on Friday, Zuckerberg said he thought the environment at many companies had gotten too culturally “neutered” — a realization he said he came to when he started interacting with more men in the mixed martial arts community.

“You want women to be able to succeed and … have companies that can unlock all the value from having great people no matter what their background or gender” is, Zuckerberg said.

“But I think these things can all always go a little far.”

Social media companies such as Meta and X also have reversed content policies aimed at protecting vulnerable groups from hateful rhetoric online, opening the door to more critiques of LGBTQ+ people and support for traditional ideas about gender. Meta’s DEI announcement arrives just days after the company implemented sweeping changes to its hate-speech rules, allowing users to post more slurs, calls for the exclusion of women and gay people from institutions, and characterizations of homosexuality as a mental illness.

For years, the social media giant projected itself as a corporate leader in the fight against sexism under the helm of former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg championed a brand of self-empowerment feminism that pushed women to seek bigger opportunities, promote themselves in the workplace and ask the men in their lives for more support. As one of the highest-ranking female executives, Sandberg pushed companies to adopt more family-friendly policies — from generous time off and financial benefits for new parents, to paid leave for the victims of sexual assault and domestic abuse.

Sandberg and Zuckerberg often worked with civil rights groups to expand the company’s content policies to take stronger stances against voter suppression and misinformation about the census that might hurt minorities.

Roy Austin, Meta’s vice president of civil rights, said on LinkedIn that he would be leaving for his “next professional adventure.” Austin, a civil rights lawyer and a former deputy assistant attorney general during the Obama administration, was hired in 2021 to beef up the company’s civil rights protections.

But Meta’s workplace diversity efforts started to take a hit following the pandemic. Like many companies, it hired remote workers who were often more likely to be women and people of color. As tech companies started to cut costs in 2022, women and some minority groups were particularly vulnerable to layoffs because they were newer to their jobs and occupied roles that companies were less interested in retaining, experts have said.

Though the share of women in Meta’s workforce has dropped for three straight years, their ranks have grown in leadership and technical roles. Women represent 35.8 percent of the company’s overall workforce, down from 37 percent in 2020, according to the company’s reporting. In recent years, the company has done less to promote its diversity programs, including a move last year not to release a formal diversity report and instead tuck the data into a larger responsible business practices report.

Meta’s new global policy chief, Joel Kaplan, on Friday defended the moves to curtail DEI programs in an interview with Fox News Digital, noting that the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision overturning affirmative action in college admissions represents “a shift in how courts will approach DEI.”

“This means evaluating people as individuals, and sourcing people from a range of candidate pools, but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics like race or gender,” Kaplan said.

The company also is reversing course on a host of content issues. On Tuesday, Meta made clear that users are free to characterize members of the LGBTQ+ community as mentally ill, or weird, “given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.” Users also are allowed to argue that women shouldn’t participate in roles in the military, law enforcement and education. And they can make similar arguments about who should be in those roles on the basis of sexual orientation, when that content is based on religious beliefs.

On Friday, Zuckerberg characterized those moves as a way for the company to catch up with “mainstream discourse,” noting that defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth may soon have to defend his prior comments before Congress that women shouldn’t be in certain combat roles.

“And until we updated our policies, that wouldn’t have been a thing that you could have said on our platforms because it would call for the exclusion of a protected category of people,” he said.

But Meta’s latest policies have triggered a backlash among activists who contend they could lead to a flood of harmful content for vulnerable populations. Company employees took to internal message boards to criticize the move, according to copies of the messages viewed by The Washington Post.

“They are becoming a front line antagonist to the LGBTQ community and they’re utilizing their platform in order to do that,” Sarah Kate Ellis, president of the LGBTQ+ rights group GLAAD, said in an interview. “Using free speech as a shield to harass and antagonize a marginalized community needs to be called what it is, which is harassment.”

Meta’s DEI retreat comes as a rash of Fortune 500 companies pare back efforts to diversify their workforces amid a shifting legal landscape and pressure from conservative activists. McDonald’s said Monday that it was similarly ending its supplier diversity program and representation goals. Walmart, Toyota, Boeing and about a dozen other companies have announced similar changes in recent months.

In late December, Amazon removed language pertaining to DEI and the rights of Black and transgender employees from homepage describing its workplace and public policy positions, The Post reported on Friday.

Hundreds of companies began reviewing their policies after the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action in university admissions, a landmark ruling that sparked dozens of lawsuits alleging that various DEI practices discriminate on the basis of race and gender, particularly against White people and men.

Some of those lawsuits have been successful, sending further chills through corporate America. In 2023, a White male lighting technician sued Meta and a group of television commercial companies over a program that gave job preferences to people of color, alleging that he was passed up for a senior role despite his decades of experience.

The plaintiff, James Harker, was represented by America First Legal, a nonprofit led by Stephen Miller, a close adviser to President-elect Donald Trump. A federal judge in New York dismissed the case in August; it is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit.

The changes to Meta’s DEI policies are particularly troubling because of how “forthright” they are, said David Glasgow, executive director of New York University’s Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.

As opposed to other companies that have released “squishy” statements about their policy changes, Meta issued “a bulleted list of a whole set of very specific DEI programs that they’re abandoning, including getting rid of their entire team focused on DEI,” he said. “It seems pretty wide-ranging to me.”

He added that corporate America’s retreat on DEI ahead of Trump’s second term contrasts dramatically with companies’ reaction during Trump’s first term.

“If anything, his [first] administration galvanized this opposition to him and to his administration around DEI values,” Glasgow said. Now, “the mood seems to be either capitulation — or let’s just quietly do the work that we want to do in the background so as not to attract attention to ourselves.”