I’m Loving It: McDonald’s Walks Back DEI Policies

The world’s largest fast food chain has decided to walk back some of its DEI commitments just a few days after Robby Starbuck let them know he was looking into them. Back in 2021, McDonald’s jumped on the corporate DEI bandwagon after some lawsuits aimed at the company.

McDonald’s rolled out a series of diversity initiatives in 2021 after a spate of sexual harrassment lawsuits filed by employees and a lawsuit alleging discrimination by a group of Black former owners of McDonald’s franchises.

“As a world-leading brand that considers inclusion one of our core values, we will accept nothing less than real, measurable progress in our efforts to lead with empathy, treat people with dignity and respect, and seek out diverse points of view to drive better decision-making,” McDonald’s Chairman and CEO Chris Kempczinski wrote in a LinkedIn post at the time.

Today, McDonald’s announced that things had changed and it was dialing back some of its specific commitments. The full statement is pretty wordy but here’s a bit of it. 

Last year, we completed a comprehensive Civil Rights Audit (CRA) that looked at all aspects of inclusion across our system. We also engaged with shareholders to understand their expectations and assessed the overall landscape of shareholder proposals. Following the Supreme Court ruling in STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS, INC. v. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE, we also assessed the shifting legal landscape to anticipate how this ruling may impact corporations such as McDonald’s. And finally, we benchmarked our approach to other companies who are also re-evaluating their own programs.

Based on this comprehensive review, we are affirming the following:

McDonald’s position and our commitment to inclusion is steadfast. Since our founding, we’ve prided ourselves on understanding that the foundation of our business is people. As Fred Turner said, “We’re a people business, and never forget it.”…

At the same time, following our comprehensive review, we also identified a few practices that we plan to modify. Specifically:

• We are retiring setting aspirational representation goals and instead keeping our focus on continuing to embed inclusion practices that grow our business into our everyday process and operations.  
• We are pausing external surveys to focus on the work we are doing internally to grow the business. 
• We are retiring Supply Chain’s Mutual Commitment to DEI pledge in favor of a more integrated discussion with suppliers about inclusion as it relates to business performance.
• We are evolving how we refer to our diversity team, which will now be the Global Inclusion Team. This name change is more fitting for McDonald’s in light of our inclusion value and better aligns with this team’s work.   

Some of this sounds like an actual change but some of it also sounds like rebranding DEI as “Inclusion” and carrying on the same. CNN took at look at this rebranding a few weeks ago.

…activists are overstating the surface-level changes many companies are making to get rid of the heat, a CNN review of company policies and interviews with consultants and DEI proponents found. DEI, while under harsh scrutiny from critics who say it’s “reverse discrimination,” is alive and well in corporate America.

Nearly all the largest companies in America still say they are committed to promoting DEI. Few companies have scrapped their DEI efforts entirely, and only a small number have made any changes at all. The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that opposes DEI, found last month that 486 of the Fortune 500 companies still have a statement or corporate commitment to DEI on their websites.

I don’t want to pretend that these companies are really making changes when some of them are probably just playing games with renaming the same DEI initiatives. On the other hand, it sounds like McDonalds is getting rid of some of the most egregious elements of their former DEI schemes, including connections to the Human Rights Campaign (that’s what they mean by “external surveys”) and goals/quotas for hiring of various races. 

This isn’t a complete win over corporate DEI at McDonalds (much less nationwide) but it is a win nonetheless. McDonalds is the leader of the fast food pack. If it makes these changes, other companies will likely follow their lead.

As mentioned above, Robby Starbuck appears to have once again been involved in prompting McDonalds to rethink their approach. He’s the same person who has prompted reconsideration from about half a dozen major corporations at this point. He posted this video about it today. 

BIG news: @McDonalds is ending a number of woke DEI policies today. Now let me tell you what’s changing and how it happened.

3 days ago I told McDonald’s that I’d be doing a story on woke policies there. Today they’ve announced the following changes:

• Hiring: They will END… pic.twitter.com/bvFglf6pxw

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) January 6, 2025