Meta on Friday told employees that its plans to end a number of internal programs designed to increase the company’s hiring of diverse candidates, the latest dramatic change ahead of President-elect Donald Trump’s second White House term.
Janelle Gale, Meta’s vice president of people, made the announcement on the company’s Workplace internal communications forum.
Among the changes, Meta is ending the company’s “Diverse Slate Approach” of considering qualified candidates from underrepresented groups for its open roles. The company is also putting an end to its diversity supplier program and its equity and inclusion training programs. Gale also announced the disbanding of the company’s diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, team, and she said that Meta Chief Diversity Officer Maxine Williams will move into a new role focused on accessibility and engagement.
Several Meta employees responded to Gale’s post with comments criticizing the new policy.
“If you don’t stand by your principles when things get difficult, they aren’t values. They’re hobbies,” one employee posted in a comment that got reaction from more than 600 colleagues.
The DEI policy change follows a number of sweeping policy reversals by the social media company this month. Last week, Meta replaced global affairs head Nick Clegg with Joel Kaplan, a veteran at the company with longstanding ties to the Republican Party. On Tuesday, Zuckerberg announced a new speech policy that included bringing an end to the company’s third-party fact-checking program.
Axios was first to report the DEI changes at the social media company. Meta didn’t immediately provide a comment.
You can read Gale’s memo, which CNBC obtained, in full below:
Hi all,
I wanted to share some changes we’re making to our hiring, development, and procurement practices. Before getting into details, there is some important background to lay out:
The legal and policy landscape surrounding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts in the United States is changing. The Supreme Court of the United States has recently made decisions signaling a shift in how courts will approach DEI. It reaffirms long standing principles that discrimination should not be tolerated or promoted on the basis of inherent characteristics. The term “DEI” has also become charged, in part because it is understood by some as a practice that suggests preferential treatment of some groups over others.
At Meta, we have a principle of serving everyone. This can be achieved through cognitively diverse teams, with differences in knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences. Such teams are better at innovating, solving complex problems and identifying new opportunities which ultimately helps us deliver on our ambition to build products that serve everyone. On top of that, we’ve always believed that no one should be given — or deprived — of opportunities because of protective characteristics, and that has not changed.
Given the shifting legal and policy landscape, we’re making the following changes:
On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach. This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds to build products that work for everyone.
We previously ended representation goals for women and ethnic minorities. Having goals can create the impression that decisions are being made based on race or gender. While this has never been our practice, we want to eliminate any impression of it.
We are sunsetting our supplier diversity effort within our broader supplier strategy. This effort focused on sourcing from diverse-owned businesses; going forward, we will focus our efforts on supporting small and medium sized businesses that power much of our economy. Opportunities will continue to be available to all qualified suppliers, including those who are part of the supplier diversity program.
Instead of equity and inclusion training programs, we will build programs that focus on how to apply fair and consistent practices that mitigate bias for all, no matter your background.
We will no longer have a team focused on DEI. Maxine Williams is taking on a new role at Meta focused on accessibility and engagement.
What remains the same are the principles we’ve used to guide our People Practices:
We serve everyone. We are committed to making our products accessible, beneficial and universally impactful for everyone.
We build the best teams with the most talented people. This means sourcing people from a range of candidate pools but never making hiring decisions based on protected characteristics, (e.g., race, gender, etc.). We will always evaluate people as individuals.
We drive consistency in employment practices to ensure fairness and objectivity for all. We do not provide preferential treatment, extra opportunities or unjustified credit to anyone based on protected characteristics. Nor will we devalue impact based on these characteristics.
We build connection and community. We support our employee communities, people who use our products and those in the communities. We operate our employee community groups (MRGs) continue to be open to all.
Meta has the privilege to serve billions of people every day. It is important to us that our products are accessible to all, and useful in promoting economic growth and opportunity around the world. We continue to be focused on serving everyone and building a multi-talented, industry-leading workforce from all walks of life.