Apple faces a DEI backlash as shareholders vote

Before Apple’s yearly investors’ meeting scheduled for Tuesday afternoon, the National Center for Public Policy Research is anticipated to present a proposal urging Apple to discontinue all of its diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
n June 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark 6-3 decision in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina, striking down race-conscious admissions policies at colleges and universities. The Court ruled that such policies, intended to promote diversity, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. While the decision directly addressed higher education, it has fueled broader debates and legal challenges regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives including in American companies.
William Gavin for Quartz:
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Ahead of Apple’s annual investors’ meeting on Tuesday afternoon, the National Center for Public Policy Research is expected to submit a proposal requesting the technology company to halt all diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs.
“It’s clear that DEI poses litigation, reputational and financial risks to companies, and therefore financial risks to their shareholders, and therefore further risks to companies for not abiding by their fiduciary duties,” the group writes in its proposal.
The think tank estimates that “likely over 50,000″ workers were potentially discriminated against, without elaborating.
The push against DEI programs comes as President Donald Trump’s administration and conservative activists have taken a hard-line stance against such programs. In January, the president directed federal agencies to identify up to nine potential civil compliance investigations of public groups and attempted to ban contracts for implementing “illegal DEI” programs.
About 20% of companies in the S&P 100 have retreated from DEI commitments, Bloomberg reports. Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, Target, McDonald’, Walmart, Boeing, Walt Disney Co., and several others have made such commitments…

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MacDailyNews Take: Again:
Making hiring decisions based on skin color is, by definition, racist. – MacDailyNews, July 14, 2023
Just as making hiring decisions based on sex is, by definition, sexist.
Getting the absolute best people should remain Apple’s ultimate goal. Forced diversity carries its own set of problems. Would the group be comprised of the best-qualifed people possible or would it be designed to hit pre-defined quotas? Would some employees, consciously or unconsciously, consider certain employees, or even themselves, to be tokens meant to fill a quota? That would be a suboptimal result for Apple and everyone involved.
The best and desired outcome is for the quest for diversity to work in Apple’s favor. Truly looking at qualified people from a larger pool would likely result in delivering different viewpoints and new ways of looking at things and tackling problems than a more homogenized workforce would likely be capable of delivering.
Regardless and of course, someday it sure would be nice for everyone to just be able to evaluate a person’s potential, not measuring and tabulating superficial, meaningless things like skin color and gender.
How do we ever get to the point where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” when we insist on judging people by the color of their skin? — MacDailyNews, December 31, 2015
See also:
• Apple on the losing side as Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions – June 29, 2023
• Several U.S. state attorneys general threaten legal action over Apple, others’ ‘diversity’ policies – July 14, 2023

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