(LifeSiteNews) — Wealth management giant Goldman Sachs plans to abandon “diversity” criteria for board membership, representing one of the biggest departures yet from the so-called “wokening” of corporate America.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Goldman has quietly agreed to a request from the National Legal and Policy Center to drop other “demographics,” which include race, “gender identity,” ethnicity, and “sexual orientation” from its criteria for selecting candidates for its board’s governance committee. The plans are expected to be officially finalized sometime this month.
Neither Goldman nor the NLPC have publicly commented on the change so far, but the change would be the latest in a string of victories for the latter, a conservative nonprofit that recently extracted similar concessions from American Express and John Deere and is working on doing the same across the corporate world.
“During the era of peak wokeness, a major firm scrapping DEI would have been unthinkable. Just look at the attacks we weathered when we became the first state to ban DEI in our universities several years ago,” remarked Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who has prioritized curbing the influence of so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. “Now, DEI is being defeated across a wide range of public and private institutions.”
In recent years, left-wing activists have used DEI and environment, societal, and governance (ESG) standards to pressure major U.S. corporations to take favorable stands on political and cultural issues such as homosexuality, transgenderism, race relations, the environment, and abortion.
Political and customer backlashes to such activism has translated to business woes for companies such as Disney and Bud Light. President Donald Trump’s defeat in 2024 of Vice President Kamala Harris for the White House has also been seen by many as further evidence of the general public rejecting woke ideology, further signaling to corporations and activists alike the lack of popular receptiveness to such projects.
The backlash has gotten companies such as Amazon, Walmart, Target, McDonald’s, Jack Daniel’s, Tractor Supply, Lowe’s, Toyota, Coors, and even Disney to back off from “woke” corporate policies.