Apple Shareholders Resoundingly Reject Proposal to Ditch the Company’s ‘Inclusion and Diversity’ Policies; Trump Responds With His Usual Equanimity

Michael Liedtke, reporting for the AP:

Apple shareholders rebuffed an attempt to pressure the technology trendsetter into joining President Donald Trump’s push to scrub corporate programs designed to diversify its workforce.

The proposal drafted by the National Center for Public Policy Research — a self-described conservative think tank — urged Apple to follow a litany of high-profile companies that have retreated from diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives currently in the Trump administration’s crosshairs.

After a brief presentation about the anti-DEI proposal, Apple announced shareholders had rejected it. In a regulatory filing submitted Tuesday evening, Apple disclosed that 97% of the ballots cast were votes against the measure.

President Trump, at 8am this morning, on his own very popular social network:

APPLE SHOULD GET RID OF DEI RULES, NOT JUST MAKE ADJUSTMENTS TO THEM. DEI WAS A HOAX THAT HAS BEEN VERY BAD FOR OUR COUNTRY. DEI IS GONE!!!

Needless to say, the National Center for Public Policy Research is a bunch of ding-dongs, and Trump has no idea, at all, what Apple’s actual policies and goals are for diversity — he just knows he wants them gone. (And I love the photo MacRumors’s Joe Rossignol chose for his report on this story.)

There does exist a formal world of DEI, right down to using that very acronym. Think of it as DEI™. Some universities seem overrun with it, despite results that strongly suggest it doesn’t work and some clearly objectionable dogmatic requirements. But there are obvious reasons any company (or university, or organization) ought to be concerned about diversity and inclusion, in the plain sense of those words. Not just ethical “the way things ought to be” reasons, but empirical studies have shown that diverse organizations are more successful.

It’s a spectrum. A lot of US universities are at the far left of that spectrum. The Trump administration and its proponents are, clearly, at the far right of that spectrum, where they’re seeking now to pressure companies into not even concerning themselves with “diversity” in the plainest sense of the word, and are scrubbing from government agencies words like “woman” and “disabled”. I’m being overly simplistic by presenting the left/right divide as unidimensional here. Trump, for example, has ushered in a very different “right” than that of, say, the Bush-Cheney era 20 years ago. But the DEI™ “left” is a very different left than the truly liberal free-speech left. Liberals object to DEI’s rigidity, dogma, and performative nature; Trump and his cohorts object to actual human diversity and inclusiveness.

Some big corporations, in recent years, veered pretty far to the extreme on “DEI initiatives”, and are using the current political moment to course correct back toward the (to me, sensible) center. But this course correction started long before Trump’s re-election. Here’s a CNBC story from December 2023 on Google and Meta scaling back formal DEI programs.

Apple, from my observations, has long charted its own consistent course on such matters, right down to calling their policies “Inclusion & Diversity” rather than the name-brand “DEI”. Apple didn’t lunge to the left at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, because they didn’t need to. And so they have no need to course correct now. Apple shareholders seemingly agree.

★ Wednesday, 26 February 2025