Employment and discrimination law specialists have been telling their corporate clients for the past two years it’s possible to minimize their chance of getting hit with a reverse discrimination lawsuit without abandoning diversity, equity and inclusion commitments by replacing their hard hiring goals with something aspirational. 

“A program that tries to establish a fixed goal — a quota — for minority hiring or minority contracting is going to be much more vulnerable than a plan that doesn’t use numerical targets,” Samir Deger-Sen, a Latham & Watkins partner, said in 2023, shortly after the Supreme Court shot down university affirmative action admissions policies as discriminatory. Even though the decision was about college admissions, critics say it helped pave the way for discrimination actions against DEI programs in business.  

That advice hasn’t been lost on Meta, it seems.

In early January, the tech giant said it was disbanding its DEI team and scrapping its diverse slate approach to hiring, which requires hiring managers to include as many underrepresented candidates for jobs as possible.

The goal, at the time the approach was created about a decade ago, was to “hard wire” diversity into the company’s culture. “The more people you interview who don’t look or think like you, the more likely you are to hire someone from a diverse background,” Maxine Williams, the company's then-global director of diversity, said at the time.

Williams pointed to a report showing the company in 2017, the first year after the diverse slate approach was launched, had increased the share of Hispanics in its workforce from 4% to 5%, African Americans from 2% to 3% and women in technical roles from 17% to 19%. 

“We still have a long way to go,” the company said in the report, “but we are committed to building a diverse and inclusive company — no matter how long it takes.”

Today, Meta is taking the position that formal DEI programs can be a hindrance to diversity efforts. In a 10-K filing Wednesday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said the change in its diversity programs is part of an effort to reduce bias in its hiring. 

“We remain committed to having a skilled, inclusive and diverse workforce with a broad range of knowledge, skills, political views, backgrounds, and perspectives because we believe cognitive diversity fuels innovation,” the company said in the filing. “To aid in this effort, we have taken steps to reduce bias in our people processes and tooling, including our hiring processes and performance management systems.”

Those steps include the changes to its diversity programs announced in early January. 

“On hiring, we will continue to source candidates from different backgrounds, but we will stop using the Diverse Slate Approach,” Janelle Gale, Meta’s HR chief, said in an internal communication Jan. 10 that announced the changes. The internal memo was published by CNBC. “This practice has always been subject to public debate and is currently being challenged. We believe there are other ways to build an industry leading workforce and leverage teams made up of world-class people from all types of backgrounds.”

Replacing a formal DEI program with aspirational language about the benefits of diversity tracks the playbook attorneys have been suggesting to their clients. In a post published on the law firm’s website last year, Fisher Phillips attorneys recommended companies offer resources and education to help strive for diversity in their workforce but not to play a numbers game. 

“Quotas have always been unlawful for private employers under Title VII and DEI programs should not replace merit-based selection processes,” the attorneys said. “While DEI programs can be mistaken as developing quotas, they should not be seen as such if executed properly. Part of proper execution includes ensuring that program objectives are carefully messaged in light of recent case law developments.”

Based on its decision to disband its diversity team and drop its diverse slate approach to hiring, among other things, and replace those formal initiatives with aspirational language, Meta seems to be taking to heart the kind of recommendations attorneys have been offering.