Has Burberry killed off diversity in the UK?

Is DEI dying? British luxury design house Burberry has caused something of a stir by giving the man in charge of all things diversity, equity and inclusion the well-shod boot.

As part of its latest cost-cutting drive – in the first quarter of 2025, after a 12 per cent slump in sales, the brand posted a £66m year-on-year loss – it is shedding 1,700 jobs worldwide. But it is the “phasing out” of Geoffrey Williams, a “key thought leader” who bore the august title of “vice-president of colleague attraction and inclusion” (I know, ugh…), that really catches the eye.

It is eight months since Donald Trump returned to the White House, and his bonfire of all things DEI may have sparked something similar in the UK.

On the day of his inauguration, Trump issued a series of executive orders withdrawing DEI programmes in the public and private sectors, liberally introduced by the Biden administration “in virtually all aspects of the federal government, from airline safety to the military”; measures dressed up as “positive discrimination” that were, to Trump’s mind at least, a “shameful discrimination” that also “demonstrated immense public waste … Americans deserve a government committed to serving every person with equal dignity and respect”.

Some pushback against DEI measures in the workplace was probably overdue – the giving of preferential treatment to members of a particular disadvantaged or underrepresented group, without consideration of merit, strikes many as… well, discriminatory. In the States, Walmart, McDonald’s, Meta and Ford are among those that have backed away from their diversity and inclusion initiatives. Given its significant market presence in the US, British pharma giant GSK has also paused diversity initiatives for its UK workforce, citing the need to align with US executive orders.

And what do you actually – practically – achieve by making, say, science professors have to write self-flagellating diversity statements in order to obtain grant money, other than making them cross?

We live in an uncertain global economy at a time of geopolitical flashpoints – conditions that make business leaders nervous. When growing revenues is far from easy, and there are lots of what they like to call “downside risks”, shareholders get restive and executives tend to look carefully at costs. Make no mistake, DEI functions are costs – the cost of hiring new staff and reallocating those in existing roles, the cost of working DEI practice into a business’s strategic initiatives, and the cost of telling the world about it. Far better to focus on business performance, because a rising tide lifts all boats.

That said, certain groups do face impediments; unfair impediments when it comes to the modern workplace. I agree that you’re never going to get pure “equity”, but we at least should strive for equality of opportunity – and we don’t have that. Not yet.

And have DEI functions done anything to address that? Well, that is the six-million-dollar question – and I’m afraid the evidence suggests that the answer is a big, fat “no”.

When the Office for National Statistics last looked at rates of pay for Black, African, Caribbean or Black British employees, when compared to their white peers, it found they earned less: £13.53 vs £14.35 an hour. Moreover, the gap was broadly consistent between 2012 and 2022. If that gap hasn’t improved over the “DEI decade”, would someone like to tell me what’s the point of it?

Disabled people like me often feel left out of the DEI conversation, because addressing the impediments we face often requires thought, effort and sometimes investment (although not as much as you might think), rather than just kind words. So we get pushed to the sidelines.

Britain currently has a yawning disability employment gap – close to 30 percentage points when you compare rates of employment of disabled people with their non-disabled peers, according to Scope, the disability charity. It has remained stubbornly high for the last decade.

Critics have long argued that DEI is just a bunch of performative virtue-signalling. And, well, it sure looks that way. So are we really losing anything if companies are rowing back – when there are legal protections in force that remain in place and HR functions, which should ensure employers are in compliance with them?

Burberry’s move might be striking from a UK perspective – but in the US, it would barely raise an eyebrow, given the number of big companies that have been rolling back on DEI there: Amazon, Target, IBM, Goldman Sachs… the list goes on.

However, DEI is not dying just yet, certainly not in the UK. Burberry, for its part, insists that it will “continue to work with external organisations to ensure inclusive practices”.

The Department for Work and Pensions, for example, lists 8,146 vacancies with DEI or some variant thereof in the job title. Just for fun, I also searched for the number of “disability inclusion” jobs. I found 154. (If you ever needed an example of why disabled people feel like second-class citizens, well, there you have it.)

In LinkedIn’s listings, there are more than 10,000 roles under the “diversity and inclusion” heading – in London alone.

Perhaps the people currently in such roles should ask themselves how much they are actually achieving. Otherwise, there will be scant sympathy for them if it turns out that, in ditching DEI, Burberry has started a fashionable new trend.