Companies Standing Up to Trump on DEI
Companies like Costco and Levi’s are rejecting the White House’s positions on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Reshma Saujani had been invited by dozens of people to speak at a networking event about her experiences as a woman who founded two nonprofit organizations, battled infertility and ran for Congress.
So far this year, the Moms First founder has won a total of 10 awards.
“I’m sharing my journey, my story, my past, my wisdom, my tools, my tips and tricks, and I probably reach hundreds of thousands of people a year,” Saujani said. “Those opportunities are currently closed and those meetings are not being held. Those talks are not being organized.”
The cause, she said, is the Trump administration’s crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion, which has had a chilling effect on women’s efforts across the business world.
President Donald Trump entered office on a campaign promise to restore equity in the workplace by eradicating “woke” DEI policies that harm men and white Americans. Fearing lawsuits and the loss of government contracts, dozens of the nation’s largest companies, from McDonald’s to Facebook owner Meta, have pulled back on their diversity programs. Pressure to align with the president’s policies has only increased in recent months.
Saujani said the current Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit against the Coca-Cola distributor that hosted the women’s retreat could jeopardize the powerful sisterhood that was created to fight the Old Boys Network.
“The reality is, women didn’t build networks because they wanted to. They built them because they had to,” she told USA TODAY.
The “New Girls Club” is widely credited with helping women break the glass ceiling. Today, women hold more important jobs than ever before, but they still lag behind men. A 2023 USA TODAY analysis of S&P 100 CEOs found that women were outnumbered 5 to 1 and women of color outnumbered 26 to 1 in senior leadership roles.
“What we were doing was bringing women and people of color together to share information, share stories, be inspired and understand that there is a path forward for us,” Saujani said. “Cutting off these opportunities is not restoring meritocracy. Cutting off opportunity is ensuring that meritocracy does not exist.”
Left behind, women rely on their own networks.
For decades, male bonding on golf courses and private clubs (many of which women weren’t allowed) has propelled men to great positions in executive suites and boardrooms.
“Research shows that networking has always been very powerful for men, and I don’t think any man would say otherwise today,” said Brian Uzzi, a leadership professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
As more women entered professional roles in the 1960s and 1970s, they began forming their own networks to overcome discrimination and other career hurdles.
Researchers studying these networks have found that “what advances men also advances women,” Uzzi said.
Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestseller “Lean In” sparked a rise in women-only networking groups — not as a mirror to exclusion, but as a response to it, said Amy Diehl, author of “Glass Walls” and gender equality researcher.
She said women who were given access and left out of the rooms where real decisions were made turned to each other for support, exchanged job opportunities and provided important information to each other in the workplace.
Women’s networks “are not excluding men, they’re helping women catch up,” Diehl said. But the Trump administration’s framing of these efforts as exclusionary has led organizations to disband gender-based mentorship and coaching programs and employee resource groups.
“Regardless of how these cases are ultimately resolved, their impact is already being felt,” Deal said.
Trump lawsuit targets women’s networking group
In the view of EEOC Chairman Andrea Lucas, employer-sponsored “gender-specific” networking, training, and development events, or “new girls’ clubs,” are no different from the “old boys’ clubs” that came before them.
In a recent talk hosted by the Labor and Employment Lawyers Association, Lucas suggested “more careful scrutiny” of company-sponsored initiatives that grant “various employment privileges and other employment benefits based on race, gender, or other protected characteristics.”
In February, Lucas fired a warning shot at her employer for excluding men from a women’s networking event.
Coca-Cola Beverage Northeast has 3,400 employees, more than 85% of whom are men. In an effort to encourage more women into bottling careers, the New Hampshire company brought 250 employees to a hotel in Connecticut in September 2024. The theme of the company’s first in-person women’s forum was “Embracing Your Authenticity: Breaking Down Barriers, Being Authentic, and Inspiring Change.”
Jennifer Mann, Coca-Cola’s president of North American operations and the event’s keynote speaker, explained how she balances work and personal life. The women, seated at tables in the ballroom, participated in a team-building exercise.
A male employee sued for discrimination, claiming he would have attended the event if he had been invited. The EEOC took up his case in January 2025, as Trump prepared to take office, saying there was “just cause” that a Coca-Cola Beverage Northeast networking event violated his civil rights.
Settlement talks broke down in August. The lawsuit in New Hampshire federal court alleges the company denied equal treatment to its male employees “either with malice or reckless indifference.” The EEOC is seeking compensatory and punitive damages for mental pain, suffering, inconvenience and “emotional distress” to the male employee and “similarly distressed male employees.”
Coca-Cola Beverage Northeast told USA TODAY the EEOC has not conducted a full investigation.
“We look forward to hearing the full story in open court and being proven innocent,” the company said in a statement. “We remain confident in our values and our continued focus on equity, respect and opportunity for all.”
Does networking for women discriminate against men?
Civil rights advocates and some employment lawyers questioned why the EEOC would devote its limited resources to the case, when it only receives a few hundred of the tens of thousands of discrimination complaints it receives each year.
“What’s really impressive to me is that the EEOC has decided that this kind of activity of women’s networking is so problematic that it has to be opposed,” said Chai Feldblum, president of EEO Leaders, a group she co-founded last year to counter the Trump administration’s employment and civil rights attacks. “I don’t think our country will do well by scaring employers away from taking proactive action to ensure fair and equal workplaces.”
“Women coming together to build the relationships and visibility that have historically been reserved for men is not morally equivalent to the behavior that led to the Civil Rights Act,” said John Hyman, head of the employment and labor practice at Wickens Herzer Panza.
“When government agencies charged with protecting workers from discrimination begin to treat women’s informal networking as a law enforcement priority, they send not just a legal message, but a cultural message. And that message is not, ‘We are enforcing the law equally.’ It is, ‘We are using the law as a weapon against the very communities that the law is meant to protect,'” he said.
But DEI critics say the EEOC has a point. This, they say, is what equal protection looks like.
“Hosting luxury, all-out-of-pocket retreats for women while marginalizing men is textbook discrimination, plain and simple. The law provides no exceptions for fashion or bona fide discrimination,” Nick Barry, senior counsel at America First legal advocacy group, told USA TODAY.
Some people, even women, don’t understand what all the fuss is about. Kat Shore, founder of an artificial intelligence company, said she has never attended a networking event for women that excludes men.
“If men are interested in women’s issues, they should be able to participate. What am I missing here?” she wrote on LinkedIn. “How would women feel if there was a men-only event? How would everyone feel if there was a whites-only event? I think these things need to be carefully considered.”
David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at New York University Law School, has been considering these questions for years. Mr Glasgow said he advises organizations to avoid awarding employment opportunities on the basis of the three P’s: “Prioritizing protected groups in terms of obvious benefits”.
Glasgow, co-author of “How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America,” says opening affinity groups, retreats, mentorship programs and other diversity initiatives to a wider audience encourages more employees to become allies and creates less resistance in the workplace.
She said the organization was initially concerned that women wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing their experiences “if there were too many men in the room.” “You don’t hear many stories like that anymore, probably because the actual makeup of events hasn’t changed as much as people feared.”
