Something quietly seismic happened to corporate language in 2025. Overnight — or close enough to overnight — the three letters that had defined a decade of workplace practice vanished from official documents, websites, annual reports, and earnings calls. DEI: gone. Diversity: fading. Equity: removed entirely by one in three companies. Inclusion: declining.
If you work in this space, you felt it. If you write in this space, you were probably asked to change something. And if you're trying to make sense of what it means, you're not alone — because the numbers tell a story that's more complicated than either “DEI is dead” or “nothing has changed.”
Gravity Research analysed 1,378 public documents from Fortune 100 companies — DEI reports, ESG filings, sustainability reports, earnings calls — published between January 2023 and May 2025. They tracked both the charged terms (DEI, diversity, racial equity) and the neutral replacements companies were adopting (belonging, inclusive, diverse perspectives). What they found was striking: not just the political language disappeared, but the safer language did too.
DEI didn't disappear in 2025. In a lot of ways, it went underground. A lot of companies didn't end their approach to DEI. They ended the word and kept the work — or kept the word and ended the work.— HR Industry Analyst, HR Brew, January 2026
Two very different things got bundled into the same headline.
The companies that renamed it
On one side: organisations that genuinely continued their inclusion work but changed the language they used to describe it — partly out of legal caution, partly in response to political pressure, partly because the term DEI had become so loaded it was generating more friction than progress.
| Company | Was | Became | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| USAA | “DEI” | “Belonging” | Work continued |
| CVS | “DEI programming” | “Inclusion and Belonging” | Messaging largely unchanged |
| HP | “Diversity, Equity & Inclusion” | “Inclusion” | No comment |
| Goldman Sachs | Race-specific language including “Black” | Scrubbed from diversity pages | Language removed |
| Oracle / Cigna | “Diversity” and related terms | All mentions removed | Fully removed |
The pattern is clear once you see it. Some of these changes are strategic rebranding — the work continues, the label changes. Others are something more troubling: the word disappears, and so does the practice it was describing.
The companies that ended it
On the other side: organisations that didn't just rename the work — they stopped doing it. McDonald's, Walmart, Target, Meta, and others announced they were ending formal DEI programmes in 2025 following the January executive order. The Conference Board found that 21% of S&P 500 companies reduced or removed DEI-related metrics and targets entirely. The share of firms disclosing data on women in management dropped 16%. Companies disclosing no information on board racial diversity jumped from 3% to 34% in a single year.
Those aren't language changes. Those are structural ones.
The companies who only did the language are quietly unwinding. The ones who did the operations are still there.
Why this matters for how we write
Here's the tension at the centre of this shift — and the part that gets lost in the political noise.
When an organisation changes the words it uses to describe its inclusion work, two things can happen. The language can evolve to become more accurate, more precise, and more effective at communicating what the work actually does. Or the language can soften to become more palatable — less specific, less accountable, easier to retreat from.
“Belonging” is a genuinely meaningful concept. It describes something real about what inclusive environments feel like. But it also does less specific work than “equity” — it doesn't require you to measure anything, audit anything, or change anything structural. You can have a belonging initiative that amounts to a Friday afternoon social event and a nice font on the internal newsletter.
The word “equity” — the one that 33% of S&P 100 companies removed entirely in 2025 — carries within it a specific obligation: to identify and close gaps in outcomes. You can't have equity without measurement. You can absolutely have belonging without it.
The language laundering problem
This is what practitioners in the space call language laundering: using the vocabulary of inclusion to describe a retreat from it. It's not new — organisations have been doing this for years. But the scale and speed of it in 2025 was unprecedented.
And it creates a specific problem for anyone writing communications for organisations navigating this moment. Because the language you choose doesn't just describe your organisation's position — it shapes it. Words carry obligations. “Equity” means something. “Belonging” means something different. “Inclusive culture” means something different again. When you swap one for another, you're not just changing vocabulary. You're changing what you're committing to.
The distinction that matters
“Equity” requires measurement and structural change. “Belonging” requires neither. When an organisation swaps one for the other, ask what obligations went with the word.
What actually holds
The research suggests something important, though, beneath all of this. The organisations that treated DEI as a language exercise — a matter of having the right words on the right pages — are the ones that folded first under political pressure. The ones that embedded inclusion into actual processes — structured hiring, pay equity audits, promotion parity reviews — are still doing the work, quietly, whether or not the word “DEI” appears anywhere in their annual report.
This is perhaps the most useful frame for anyone writing about inclusion right now. The argument for inclusive language was never really about the words. It was always about what the words signal, what they commit you to, and who they bring into the room — or leave out of it.
The word “DEI” didn't make organisations inclusive. Neither will removing it make them less so — unless they let the practices go with the vocabulary.
When a company swaps “DEI” for “belonging” — ask what changed besides the word.
The question for communicators
If you write for an organisation that has made this shift — or is considering it — the most useful question to ask isn't “which words are safe?” It's “do our words still describe what we actually do?”
Because the real risk of language laundering isn't external. It's internal. When the vocabulary of accountability disappears from an organisation's communications, it gradually disappears from its meetings, its reviews, and its decisions. Language doesn't just reflect culture. Over time, it constructs it.
The organisations navigating this moment best are the ones that have separated two questions that got muddled in 2025: what words do we use publicly? and what are we actually committed to doing? Those can have different answers. But they shouldn't contradict each other.
Write the second one first. Then find the language that describes it honestly.
Sources
Gravity Research (December 2025). Changes in Corporate DEI Language. Analysis of 1,378 public documents from Fortune 100 companies, January 2023–May 2025.
The Conference Board (August 2025). DEI in Transition: 2025 Corporate Diversity Disclosure Trends. Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance.
HR Brew (January 2026). More than half of the Fortune 100 has changed public-facing DEI language since the 2024 election.
Catalyst (December 2025). Inclusion Works: 2026 Global Trends Report.
Diversity.com (April 2025). Why Companies Are Reframing DEI Language in 2025.
MangoApps (April 2026). Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI): What It Is in 2026.