Shopify lays off team supporting Black, Indigenous and women entrepreneurs

The first is preference falsification Cascade.

The second is the fact that businesses are legally obligated through their fiduciary duty to maximize value for shareholders. Many of these Dei programs couldn't logically be justified through the lens of maximizing shareholder value, so once they were no longer legally mandated, in a sense, there was a pre-existing legal mandate to remove them.

If we believe corporations are rationally working toward their own profit goals, the idea that they've become overt Trump activists seems like an emotional interpretation. We either need to maintain the concept of corporate amorality or decide everything, including an insensitive invisible hand, has somehow become pro-Trump.

I think there are other logical premises for and against DEI if you strip corporations of this veneer of social responsibility:

1. DEI was only ever a PR exercise, to score higher in ESG-related investments or to attract talent;

2. DEI provided them with a positive image to downstream customers;

3. DEI provided new hiring channels when conventional ones were failing HR departments during a constrained hiring market.

It seems that DEI has become a cost center, and that cost is greater than the negative PR cost they're taking by getting rid of it.

The above benefits may no longer hold true, but I'd also suspect that some of these companies are worried about retaliatory action of the new DOJ interpreting DEI initiatives as a discriminatory thus illegal hiring practice. Litigation against the federal government is expensive. Being shut out of a labor market also is.

Shopify may be a Canadian company, but one that also hires globally remote and the USA is a huge source of that talent.