In 2019, Angela Roseboro took on what might have seemed like an impossible job. As the new chief diversity officer at Riot Games, she was tasked with overhauling the culture right as the company was weathering very public claims of sexism and a class-action lawsuit alleging gender discrimination and sexual misconduct. “I didn’t want to go to a company that wanted a face of diversity,” she says. “I wanted to do real work.”
And she did: During her time there, Roseboro, who reported directly to then-CEO Nicolo Laurent, conducted a pay-equity audit and broadened its talent acquisition to hire more non-gamers. In its most recent diversity report, Riot disclosed that the number of women at the company had increased to 21% across leadership roles. Riot’s efforts extended into its actual games, too, as the company introduced more diverse characters.
But more than three years later, Roseboro was ready to leave, in spite of the culture shifts she had set into motion. Even as she was making those changes, Roseboro had to navigate and react to other allegations of misconduct: In 2021, a former employee filed a harassment and discrimination suit against Laurent, which moved into arbitration after an independent investigation found no evidence of wrongdoing. (That year, Riot also settled the class-action suit, paying $100 million to former and current workers—albeit only after the company’s initial proposal of a $10 million payout was rejected.) Between the drum beat of the pandemic and ongoing racial violence, Roseboro felt more like a crisis manager than anything else. It was hard to be anything but reactive when the world was spinning off its axis. “It wasn’t that I didn’t feel supported,” she says. “Honestly I think I ran out of gas.” After closing out 2022 with Riot, Roseboro stepped away to start her own consulting practice.
Many of Roseboro’s peers in the tech industry have found themselves in a similar state, facing burnout and the mounting pressures of their work. A revolving door of diversity leaders have passed through companies like Google and Twitter over the last decade, but the last few years have seen especially high rates of turnover and notable DEI departures across the business community. Pinterest has cycled through three DEI leads over the last four years, while Apple is onto its third diversity leader since making its first such hire in 2017. Like many companies, Zoom brought on a chief diversity officer in 2020, but they stepped down after less than two years; the role has been vacant since. Airbnb has yet to retain a chief diversity officer for more than two and a half years. And it’s not just the tech world that has seen this kind of turnover: In the last month alone, at least six DEI executives—all Black women—have stepped down from their posts at entertainment companies including Netflix and Disney.
While tech companies draw more attention for their missteps, the growing upheaval in this space—and the challenges faced by diversity leaders—transcend any one industry. As of 2021, the average tenure for chief diversity officers in the S&P 500 is less than two years, down from more than three years in 2018. Nearly 60% of those who held the role in 2018 have since moved on to other companies or positions, in most cases leaving the chief diversity officer track altogether. Twitter’s most recent diversity lead, for example, joined Peloton as its chief people officer. Other diversity leaders, like Roseboro, opt to start their own consulting practice rather than trying their hand at another internal role. (It’s also true, however, that the spike in demand for chief diversity officers has contributed to turnover, as DEI leaders are lured away by more competitive offers.)
“People externally sometimes criticize the [chief diversity officers] who are leaving,” says Tanya Odom, the director of the equity and inclusion program at the Walton Family Foundation, the charitable organization led by the billionaire family behind Walmart. But she says these shorter tenures make sense: “I think you know by two years if you’re going to be able to make some of the changes that you want to see. And to the point of burnout: How tired are you? How much do you want to push?”
This rise in burnout comes as companies are divesting from DEI work. Three years after protests against racial injustice swept the country, many of the companies that employ these practitioners could be described as consciously uncoupling from their commitments to DEI. What once seemed like a seismic shift across corporate America—including in workplaces that had long resisted calls for diversity—has waned considerably.
The AI startup Textio found that job postings for DEI positions had fallen by 19% in 2022 alone, as reported by Bloomberg. A group of researchers—which included Todd Corley, a seasoned DEI leader who is now at the workwear clothing brand Carhartt—surveyed more than 40 chief diversity officers in 2019 and again in 2021, capturing both the dimming investment in DEI and the toll of the pandemic on its practitioners. The researchers noted, in a recent Harvard Business Review article, that DEI leaders found that interest in their work had dimmed rather quickly after 2020—leaving many of them fatigued and emotionally drained, especially as the “mounting expectations of [chief diversity officer] and outward promises failed to be met with real internal accountability or strategic commitments.”
In the last six months, however, this rollback has accelerated: Fueled by the threat of a recession—one that has yet to materialize—companies across the tech sector have cut nearly 340,000 jobs over the past year, in many cases taking particular aim at their DEI teams. Twitter’s 30-person DEI team was left with just two employees after repeated layoffs and the turmoil since Elon Musk took over, according to Bloomberg. Former DEI employees at tech giants like Amazon and Facebook told Bloomberg that they anticipated some of their responsibilities would fall to their colleagues who lead employee resource groups—and who are typically not paid for their diversity work.
Leila*, a former diversity leader at a mid-sized tech company who requested anonymity to protect her severance agreement, says that when she was hired in early 2020, she was given the resources and support to build out the company’s DEI initiatives. All that changed last fall: “The further we got from George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, the lower priority [this work] was,” she says.
This is hardly a new phenomenon: When budgets shrink and investors pressure tech leaders to curb spending, diversity initiatives are an easy target. For many diversity leaders, this wavering corporate commitment to DEI is almost an inevitability. But it begs the question: Is there a sustainable model for DEI work when it is perpetually shaped by the whims of executives?
The tech industry has always had an on-again, off-again relationship with equity and inclusion work. In 2014, when tech companies could no longer ignore surging public pressure—sparked, in part, by a buzzy Medium post from engineer and now Block Party founder Tracy Chou—some of the biggest players in the industry finally started publishing diversity reports. It was a turning point, as many companies scrambled to appoint DEI leaders and conduct unconscious bias trainings. But there was an outsized focus on hiring and the so-called pipeline problem, and many companies seemed more invested in the appearance of progress than anything else. (A common refrain in company announcements about diversity was that there was “more work to do.”) Within just a few years, DEI experts found that the appetite for their services was dissipating.
When the pandemic hit, upending business as usual, diversity consultants wondered if they could stay afloat as clients disappeared. But after Floyd’s murder and the resulting outcry, they had more business than they could handle. Companies also moved swiftly to bulk up their internal diversity teams: As of last year, over half of the Fortune 500 companies had a chief diversity officer or another leader in an equivalent role, according to a 2022 report from McKinsey, and more than 60 companies in the Fortune 500 had hired their first diversity leader after May 2020. Between 2015 and 2020, DEI-related job postings increased by 71%, but following Floyd’s death, those numbers spiked by 123%.
Some companies backed up these DEI hires with financial pledges: In 2021, Fast Company found that 42 leading tech companies had set aside nearly $4 billion to support Black-owned businesses, racial justice organizations, and internal diversity initiatives. Even so, many of the activists and technologists Fast Company consulted at the time predicted—correctly, it turned out—that the momentum wouldn’t last. That was especially true at companies where the embrace of DEI was mostly driven by disclosures from employees and whistleblowers.
Diversity leaders are often thrust into roles without clear expectations from above, but the issue became especially acute in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and amid mounting attacks on Asian American communities. When demand for chief diversity officers reached its apex in 2020, many companies were so focused on hiring someone—in part to burnish their reputations—that they didn’t consider what the role should actually entail, or how to measure success. In many cases, executive compensation wasn’t yoked to progress on diversity, making it that much harder for DEI leaders to shore up support among their senior peers. As the McKinsey report notes, “The scope and nature of the position are often poorly defined, with ambiguity about everything from its purpose to its authority and even seniority within the organization.”
At some companies, DEI has become intertwined with broader ESG efforts, which means diversity leaders may be walking into a job that they’re not necessarily equipped for. What’s more, as workers urge their employers to speak out on issues like abortion access and anti-LGBTQ legislation, chief diversity officers can find themselves caught between advocating for their employees and acting as a public mouthpiece for the company.
The result is that DEI leaders end up in a catch-all role, where they are expected to tackle anything that comes their way. At larger companies, like Riot, DEI leaders have been elevated to more senior titles or now report to the CEO. But plenty of smaller or midsize organizations still consider DEI roles to be part of human resources, giving the people who hold these titles less authority and importance. Before she was laid off, Leila had effectively been tasked with building her company’s entire DEI strategy, which extended far beyond human resources. While she says she made significant progress, she felt like her work didn’t get the recognition it deserved, especially since she was reporting to people who had never worked in DEI. “I could get pulled into literally anything and everything that might be related to DEI,” she says. “I was the only expert.”
Without clear expectations and true partnership with C-suite leaders, even a DEI role that comes with adequate resources and support can become untenable. “I had a really large team. I had everything that you would think that you need,” Roseboro says of her time at Riot. “But when you’re a change agent, you’re always the dissenting view. It’s a lonely place sometimes.”
It’s hard to overstate the psychic toll of this work, especially when it feels deeply personal for many people of color. During the last few years, they’ve been expected to weigh in on an increasing number of traumatic news events—from mass shootings to police brutality. “One of the things that newer practitioners keep saying to me is: How have you done this for so long?” says Odom from the Walton Family Foundation, who has worked in the DEI space for more than two decades. “I don’t know if it’s sad or good, but I’ve never asked myself that question.”
People are still drawn to DEI work, particularly following the seismic events of 2020. But as companies lose skilled employees to layoffs and burnout, they often bring in cheaper hires who lack experience. Amazon, for example, reportedly pushed out people from the company’s core diversity team in 2019 and 2020 and brought on employees with virtually no background in DEI work, according to Vox; by mid-2021, the team had fewer than 10 people overseeing DEI for a workforce of 1.5 million full- and part-time employees.
The issue of quality control is also muddying diversity consulting, as people have flooded the space and set up their own practices. In 2020, when Odom accepted her current role after decades of running a well-respected DEI consulting practice, she didn’t take the decision lightly. She wanted to make sure her long-time clients were in good hands, but she also worried about the impact of people like her stepping away from consulting. “What [would] it mean,” she recalls thinking, “to take another seasoned consultant out of the space?”
Over the last few decades, DEI work has evolved beyond its origins in regulatory compliance, when the focus was ensuring that companies fell in line with equal opportunity laws and anti-discrimination policies. Today, DEI work is viewed as a business imperative alongside ESG efforts, so much so that it has become fodder for conservative outrage.
When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, conservatives seized the opportunity to denounce the bank’s DEI initiatives, arguing that this “woke” agenda had distracted its executives. Anti-ESG investors at the Free Enterprise Project, meanwhile, have introduced shareholder proposals against Levi’s and Apple that take aim at their diversity policies. These proposals, along with others that target companies like Meta and Twitter, have failed to get traction, but they could engender skepticism among investors who worry that DEI work is a distraction from the bottom line. And after the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on affirmative action, many diversity experts and legal observers are concerned about the potential ripple effects across the workplace—that the decision could invite more litigation from employees with grievances and even hinder corporate DEI programs.
Against this backdrop, it seems all the more important for companies to recommit to DEI, if they purport to care about this work. But they’re pulling back. Some practitioners point the finger at investors, who they believe were the puppeteers behind this retreat, pushing executives to brace for a recession and cut spending over the last year. Others accept that this is simply part of the boom-bust cycle of DEI: Many tech companies expect immediate results and may not have the attention span for deeper, more incremental change.
There are consequences for disinvesting from DEI, even temporarily, or cycling through diversity leaders. By this point, many workers have undergone lackluster diversity trainings—an experience that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence or gin up support for DEI initiatives. (In fact, research indicates that unconscious bias trainings aren’t always effective and can even reinforce prejudice.) When companies implement measures that are largely designed to check boxes or project the appearance of progress, it can further compound the issue, doing little to assuage skeptics.
Tech companies that have engaged in good faith with DEI work have seen the benefits. Slack has invested in racial justice initiatives, such as an apprenticeship program for formerly incarcerated workers at Slack. And both Slack and Twilio were among the first to extend the protections secured by California’s Silenced No More Act—which protects workers who violate a confidentiality agreement to speak out against harassment or discrimination—to all of their employees nationally. They’ve seen meaningful changes to the makeup of their workforce, and Slack continues to outperform tech behemoths on metrics like gender diversity and underrepresented minorities in technical roles.
But progress is not always linear, even at companies that seem committed to the work: In its most recent diversity report, Slack acknowledged that attrition among underrepresented employees had increased. “This is disappointing, something we take very seriously and are actively working to address,” the report stated. “While we are working to better understand the reasons for this attrition, we believe contributing factors include the intense demand for tech talent industry-wide and the lengthy tenure of some early employees.”
Even Riot, which had become a poster child for tech-bro misogyny when Roseboro joined in 2019, has seen promising signs of change, she says. Roseboro claims to have spoken to about a thousand employees during her first few months at the company. “They loved what they did,” she recalls, “But they felt hurt.” By the time she left in 2022, Roseboro had built up a diversity and inclusion team of 10 people and introduced far-reaching changes to make Riot’s hiring processes more inclusive. Riot’s latest diversity report shows that women now make up more than a quarter of Riot’s workforce, up from 22% in 2019. That might not sound like a drastic change, but Roseboro points out that retention is critical to seeing even minor increases. “It’s hard to move three percentage points forward,” she says, “[but] it is so easy to move six percentage points backwards.”
Perhaps most importantly, Roseboro says there has been a noticeable shift in sentiment—that employees claim to have seen and felt the changes she made at the company. That’s not to say things are perfect: The Washington Post noted in 2022 that Riot’s diversity numbers have fluctuated in recent years, and some employees believe the company still has plenty of room for improvement, citing concerns over how Riot addresses diversity and representation issues in its games. The 2021 lawsuit brought against Laurent seems to support that notion—and embody the challenges of the chief diversity officer role—though Roseboro says the company was as transparent as possible with its employees at the time. “I’ve always thought about: If something happens, what [are] our learnings from it?” Roseboro says, noting that Riot’s leadership addressed the investigation’s findings and engaged directly with employees. “It’s not like we didn’t talk to the company about it; we did. I think that transparency helped in terms of rebuilding trust.”
Still, there’s a knotty question that looms large even in the best-case scenarios: whether companies are truly ready to not only empower DEI leaders to effect change, but also find a way to safeguard them in the most trying moments of the job. If companies have spent years asking DEI leaders to fix their culture, perhaps the more pressing concern today is whether their culture can support those changemakers.
