The Frontier of Diversity: Tech Firm Approaches to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Admidst Cultural, Organizational, and Regulatory Pressures From 2019-2025

Abstract 

In this paper I study how U.S. technology companies shifted their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion practices in response to cultural, organizational, and regulatory pressures; specifically, I analyze how these practices evolved at Google, Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft from 2019-2025. Furthermore, I interrogate how reactions to cultural, organizational, or regulatory pressures manifested in actions of support, stagnation, or withdrawal of DEI at the cost of a firm’s marginalized employees.

To frame these approaches, I term the Tripartite Framework, which demonstrates how Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion operates across the deeply interconnected dimensions of sociocultural, organizational, and regulatory pressures. Rather than assuming DEI is just a business strategy, the Tripartite Framework reveals DEI as a contested site where corporate interest, social expectation, and legal obligation converge, often producing outcomes that reflect the priorities of the industry rather than the needs of the employees it claims to advocate for. Although DEI is thought to be solely a framework to improve workplace culture and company contributions, I argue that DEI is simultaneously a byproduct of a racial capitalist system that commodifies difference rather than dismantling it. Big tech’s approach to DEI is one that absorbs the language of equity and belonging while leaving the underlying structures of exclusion largely intact.

My intention with introducing this research and framework is that it can problematize and complicate other organizational projects that are dismissed as neutral business practices, offering scholars, practitioners, and critics alike a replicable analytical tool for interrogating the competing forces that govern institutional decision-making.

Read Honors Thesis here.