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Paper Abstract
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After a number of years in which corporations have increased their use of social initiatives and internal diversity policies, corporations are now facing pressure to discontinue such policies, in particular in the United States. How this affects corporate incentives to introduce, maintain or reverse such policies depends on stakeholder reactions. We present results from a well-powered, pre-registered, online vignette experiment where we test the effect of reversing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies on respondent willingness to work for a company. A politically representative sample of 1600 US respondents were randomized into four treatment arms. In the first treatment they were presented with a hypothetical company that introduces and maintains a DEI programme, in the second treatment a company that introduces but then discontinues a DEI programme for non-political reasons, in the third treatment the DEI programme is introduced but discontinued due to political pressure, and in the fourth control condition the company never introduces a DEI programme. The results show that respondents exhibit a stronger willingness to work for a company that introduces and maintains a DEI programme compared to the control. However, reversing a DEI programme for non-political reasons leads to worse employee perceptions than never having a programme in the first place. Moreover, this negative effect is significantly greater if the programme is discontinued due to political pressure. While reversing a DEI programme is adversely related to perceptions of professionalism of a company, we find that the main mechanism explaining the drop in stakeholder perceptions is a perceived lack of authenticity. Results are also highly heterogeneous by political preference, liberal respondents favour DEI and disfavour DEI reversal, while conservative respondents oppose DEI programmes and are not mollified by their reversal.
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