Major Wall Street banks are reportedly scrubbing DEI verbiage from their websites in the latest industry retreat since Donald Trump took office and took aim at corporate wokeness.
JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup have been erasing so-called diversity, equity and inclusion language from their websites, people familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal.
Wells Fargo and Bank of America have also started to scrutinize their own DEI language, some of the people told the Journal.
Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Bank of America and HSBC did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
JPMorgan Chase’s annual report on Friday displayed a sharp turnaround from the year before, when the bank prided itself on robust DEI programs and titled a table with its employees’ demographics “Diversity, equity and inclusion,” according to the report.
This year, that same table was labeled “Workforce compensation,” and the company warned in its filing that it expects to face continuing attacks on any of its DEI policies.
JPMorgan chief executive Jamie Dimon, who famously took a knee with branch staffers amid the 2020 racial protests, had supported DEI policies in full swing.
But the CEO ordered a review of the bank’s policies after the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action, to ensure the company did not have hiring quotas, according to The Post’s Charles Gasparino.
On its “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” page on its website, the company boasts that “58% of new US hires are racially or ethnically diverse.”
It turns out that figure comes from hiring workers in urban areas, where many JPMorgan banks are located, and onboarding a lot of tech people who are often of Asian descent, according to Gasparino.
JPMorgan declined to comment.
Over the past few weeks, HSBC’s diversity and inclusion page on its website shrank from approximately 1,000 words to less than 100, according to the Journal.
Information about diversity resource groups for employees is gone from the site, along with diversity data and the company’s DEI mission, the report said.
HSBC Bank USA is a subsidiary of the British banking group.
Meanwhile, Citi removed some of its LGBTQ language from its career website, removing information on a program that allows transgender and nonbinary clients to use their preferred names on credit cards, the report said.
Citi declined to comment.
The banks are the latest to join in a widespread policy reversal from 2020, when major US companies implemented DEI initiatives after George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests.
Large companies like Walmart, Target and McDonald’s have retracted their diversity programs, as well as behemoths in the tech industry like Meta, Amazon and Google, in the months before and after Trump’s inauguration.
On his first day in office, the president banned DEI programs across the federal level and calling on government agencies to investigate companies’ diversity policies.
More changes from major US banks are likely on the horizon.
Both Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were slapped last year with shareholder proposals from conservative activists urging stakeholders to vote against DEI policies.
Shareholders will have the chance to vote on those proposals this spring.
Last week, Goldman said it was ending its requirement that companies in the US and Western Europe have diverse boards in order to take them public. The bank said it scrapped the policy because of legal developments.
Now, major firms are weighing whether they need to kill the programs altogether or face legal repercussions, the report said.
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