Do DEI professionals promote corporate commitments to racial justice?

Shortly after the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, during the largest mass protests in U.S. history, we noticed a surge in corporate commitments to racial justice. While some of these commitments were impressive, on closer inspection we found that engagement was far from universal: most firms stayed silent, others made quite weak responses, and still others made substantial commitments of resources and pledged to change aspects of their business model. More recently, in light of the Supreme Court decision to limit affirmative action in elite college admissions, we wondered if those same set of firms might have joined corporate amicus briefs in support of continued affirmative action in college admissions. This led us to design research on the 500 largest U.S. firms to explore why some firms made muscular commitments to racial justice. Eventually, we focused on the potential influence of DEI professionals. We harvested DEI professionals from LinkedIn profiles. While laborious to collect, clean and code, these data are a great resource to discover where DEI professionals were employed in 2020 and what their career histories looked like. We observe a strong relationship between firm's DEI staff's prominence in the national network of DEI professionals and muscular 2020 commitments to racial justice. These same firms also signed onto amicus briefs before the Supreme Court in favor of affirmative action in college admissions. Our findings have held up so far in statistical model where we have controlled for numerous other factors that might be of relevance to these patterns, including the size of the firm, prior social justice commitments, Iindustry, as well as the racial composition of the firm’s employees and executives. Most large firms are not woke, but those that are tend to be large and have connected DEI staff.