Women Who Code shut down in April. Girls in Tech dissolved in August. Tech Talent Charter closed the same month. Three organizations that collectively supported hundreds of thousands of women and underrepresented people in tech—gone within five months of each other.

This isn’t a coincidence. It’s a pattern, and the data behind it is damning.

The Numbers #

DEI-related job postings declined 44% by mid-2023 compared to the prior year. By late 2023, the decline accelerated further. CNBC reported in December 2023 that Google, Meta, Zoom, and the company formerly known as Twitter all made significant cuts to their DEI teams and programs. Not trims. Cuts.

The hiring pipeline tells an even darker story. Female new recruit levels in US tech dropped from 36% in 2022 to 12% in 2023. In the UK, the decline was nearly identical: 35% to 11%. Those aren’t rounding errors—that’s a collapse.

And the legal environment has turned hostile. At least 53 federal lawsuits targeting DEI programming were filed in 2024, challenging everything from corporate diversity training to hiring programs. The legal strategy is clear: make DEI programs expensive to defend, and companies will drop them regardless of whether the suits succeed.

How We Got Here #

The standard narrative says this is about post-pandemic belt-tightening. Companies overhired in 2021-2022, laid off aggressively in 2023, and DEI roles were among the first cut because they’re seen as “non-essential.” There’s truth in that framing, but it’s incomplete.

The deeper story? Many DEI programs were performative from the start. Companies hired Chief Diversity Officers after George Floyd’s murder in 2020. They announced targets, pledged money, issued statements. Four years later, the urgency faded, the political environment shifted, and the programs—many of which never had meaningful executive backing—became easy to dismantle.

I’ve sat through enough diversity strategy meetings at large companies to recognize the pattern. The commitments were real in the sense that money was spent and people were hired. They were performative in the sense that the programs rarely had the power to change how decisions actually got made. When budgets tightened, the programs disappeared and the underlying decision-making structures stayed exactly the same.

That’s the part that makes me angry. Not that the programs were cut (some were ineffective), but that the structural changes the programs were supposed to enable never happened. We’re back to square one, except now there’s less political will, less funding, and a generation of advocates who feel burned.

The Business Case Still Holds #

I’m a CTO. I think about this through a talent pipeline lens, and from that angle, the retreat from DEI is strategically stupid.

The demand for engineering talent hasn’t decreased. The pool of available talent hasn’t grown. If anything, the AI boom has made the competition for skilled engineers more intense. Narrowing your recruiting funnel by abandoning programs that bring in candidates from underrepresented backgrounds doesn’t just hurt diversity—it hurts your ability to hire.

I’ve managed teams across four time zones. The best engineering cultures I’ve built drew from diverse backgrounds: different countries, different educational paths, different perspectives on how to solve problems. That wasn’t an accident; it was the result of deliberate effort to recruit broadly and create environments where different kinds of people could succeed.

When you cut the programs that enable that breadth, you don’t save money. You lose access to talent your competitors will happily snap up. And in a market where senior engineers get 10 recruiter messages a week, the companies known for backing away from inclusion commitments will find themselves lower on the list.

The Advocacy Gap #

The closure of organizations like Women Who Code and Girls in Tech creates a void that won’t be filled quickly. These organizations did unglamorous, essential work: mentorship programs, job boards focused on underrepresented candidates, community events where people who felt isolated in their workplaces could connect with peers.

Corporate DEI programs (even good ones) can’t replace independent advocacy organizations. Corporate programs serve the company’s interests first; independent orgs serve the community. When both disappear simultaneously, the support network for underrepresented people in tech collapses.

I’ve talked to women engineers who used Women Who Code’s community as a lifeline during difficult stretches at companies that weren’t inclusive. Those communities mattered in ways that don’t show up on a balance sheet. Their absence will be felt for years.

What Leadership Actually Looks Like #

I’m not going to pretend I have a five-point plan to fix this. The systemic forces—political backlash, budget cuts, legal challenges, and performative commitments finally being exposed—are bigger than any single company or CTO.

But here’s what I know from running engineering teams: culture is a leadership choice. Every day. You can choose to interview candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. You can choose to promote people who build inclusive teams. You can choose to fund ERGs and mentorship programs even when nobody’s watching. You can choose to push back when someone suggests cutting the diversity recruiting budget because “we need to focus on core priorities.”

None of that requires a formal DEI program. It requires leaders who actually care and are willing to spend political capital on it.

The companies that maintain their commitments through this period—not performatively, but structurally—will have a significant talent advantage in three to five years. The rest will be writing blog posts in 2027 about how hard it is to hire diverse engineering teams, wondering what went wrong.

The retreat from DEI in tech is real. The organizations are closing. The budgets are gone. What happens next depends entirely on whether individual leaders decide this matters enough to act without the corporate infrastructure that used to make it easy.