Diversitty Metrics Research

Welcome to the research page for the Diversity Metrics research project!

January 18, 2026 | Mark O'Neill | Amsterdam

Background

After Trump signed executive orders in February of 2025 terminating all so-called “DEI positions” within the federal government, major corporations in the US also reduced or abandoned their diversity initiatives (Adamczeski & Ring, 2025). Diverse, equitable, and inclusive employment practices have been important concepts in communication science since the late 1990’s. Subsequently, corporations have struggled to keep up with stakeholder interests in diversity, industry best practices for employing a broad spectrum of people, and positive image portrayals as diverse employers (Edgley, Sharma, & Anderson-Gough, 2016).

Organisations can communicate their commitment to DEI through diversity messages, which have become common discursive elements in corporate media (Kroon, van Selm, ter Hoeven, & Vliegenthart, 2017). A company could write something like “we are deeply committed to diversity” on the career page of their website to express this. However, critics feel that rhetoric alone does not demonstrate legitimate commitments to diversity and instead call for transparent reporting of diversity data (Windscheid et al., 2018). These data are measurements, or metrics, of employee demographics expressed in numeric values to quantify workplace diversity and express it to stakeholders (Maier & Ravazzani, 2018). Messaging like “over 43% of our senior managers are women under 40” provides useful data contextualising the diversity climate within their organisation, in this case, providing metrics for sex and age diversity.

Research

Coming Soon!

The resources below are offered for private use and may not be modified, adapted, or distributed without expressed permission from the authors. This research received financial support from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) for coding assistance. The research design has been adapted from an unpublished bachelor’s thesis (O’Neill, 2019). Not affiliated with Fortune Media or the Fortune 500 ranking. There are no conflicts of interest to declare. Any self-published results or resources have not been subjected to a formal peer-review process, although several experts and advisors contributed to the project at various stages. (IRB: ASCoR Ethics Committee)