August 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. More recently, corporations have struggled to keep up with stakeholder interests in diversity, industiral 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 owned and earned 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 these sentiments. 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 external stakeholders (Maier & Ravazzani, 2018). Messages 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!
Resources below are offered for private use and may not be modified, adapted, or distributed without expressed written permission from the author. This research received financial support from the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) for coding assistance. There are no conflicts of interest to declare. Self-published results have not been subjected to formal peer-review, although several experts, advisors, and editors have contributed to the project at various stages. (IRB: ASCoR Ethics Committee)