Goldman Sachs is removing race, gender identity, sexual orientation, and other demographic factors from the criteria its board uses to select directors, according to the Wall Street Journal. The shift marks another milestone in Wall Street’s swift abandonment of diversity mandates—and signals a broader reckoning across corporate America.
The decision follows pressure from the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative activist group that owns a small stake in the bank. Goldman informed the group it would eliminate the DEI criteria, and the two parties signed an agreement under which the activist organization withdrew its formal shareholder proposal. Goldman’s board is expected to approve the new language this month.
The removal represents more than a technical adjustment. It constitutes an implicit rejection of the philosophical premise underlying corporate DEI—that demographic characteristics should factor into hiring, selection, and promotion decisions. For Goldman, one of America’s most influential financial institutions, the decision carries outsized weight in signaling how thoroughly the corporate consensus around diversity mandates has unraveled.
Goldman’s decision arrives in an environment fundamentally transformed by legal and political challenges to DEI. In 2023, the Supreme Court ruled in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard that race-conscious admissions policies constituted unconstitutional discrimination, effectively ending decades of affirmative-action jurisprudence. The decision signaled a judiciary increasingly hostile to the racial preferences that formed the intellectual and legal foundation of many corporate DEI programs.
Political pressure has intensified under the Trump administration. The president issued executive orders prohibiting DEI-based discrimination by federal contractors. For firms that do business with the federal government, the new regime raises the compliance stakes and narrows the room for DEI programs that blur into unlawful preference.
Beyond contractor compliance, the Trump administration has explicitly targeted large publicly traded corporations like Goldman. Federal agencies have been directed to identify and potentially pursue civil investigations against companies with “egregious and discriminatory” DEI programs. The executive order also empowers the administration to recommend litigation against private-sector entities and to pursue regulatory action and enforcement guidance—creating a multi-front assault on corporate diversity initiatives.
Goldman’s embrace of this new anti-discrimination environment has accelerated over the past twelve months. Last year, the bank dropped its commitment to support board diversity for clients going public—a requirement that once functioned as a quasi-mandate for companies seeking Goldman’s investment-banking services. It also retooled its multibillion-dollar “One Million Black Women” initiative, removing explicit references to race from a program ostensibly designed to invest in Black businesswomen and nonprofit leaders.
These weren’t incremental adjustments. Goldman’s move epitomizes a broader corporate reversal. Banks and major corporations that once championed DEI—especially during the corporate stampede that followed a summer of often violent protests and destructive riots in the wake of George Floyd’s death during an arrest in 2020—are now dismantling these programs or stripping them down to legally safer forms. The cascade of reversals has the potential to retool the American economy away from discriminatory practices deployed in pursuit of left-wing notions of equity and diversity, though critics warn that enforcement will matter, since firms can rebrand DEI without abandoning it.
What was unthinkable two years ago—the formal removal of sex, ethnicity, sex preference, race, and other demographic factors as a selection criterion—is now becoming standard corporate practice.
For Wall Street specifically, the implications run deeper. Goldman used its investment-banking clout to impose diversity requirements on public companies. Now it’s signaling those requirements were misguided. In many ways, Goldman acts as a cultural leader for the financial sector, with its policies setting the tone for the rest of Wall Street.
