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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Last Monday, when newly unified President Donald Trump announced The US government would now only recognize two genders, male and female, a triumph of corporate diversity hailed in Davos.
It was aimed at a boss who had just narrated an event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum about a transgender employee who had long dreamed of adopting a little girl and buying a house for her mother.
“A few months ago she sent me a message and said, ‘I’ve done both,'” said the boss, clearly pleased with the opportunities women now had in a company to make its workforce more diverse and inclusive.
The name of this woke business warrior? Priya Agarwal Hebbar, chairwoman of India’s Hindustan zinc mining company and non-executive director of the Vedanta conglomerate Vedanta, founded by her father Anil Agarwal.
For the avoidance of doubt, the idea of a woke mining boss makes as much sense as Trump taking up yoga.
Hebbar was by no means the only leader in Davos to make it clear that MAGA’s vision of corporate life is being resisted by boardrooms that have determined that diversity and environmental measures they adopted years ago make financial sense.
“We will not change course,” said Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi in an interview with the FT at the Alpine meeting. “We believe that building a working group that is diverse, that is global and thinks about all aspects of the business, that’s positive, that’s just good business.”
Ralph Lauren boss Patrice Louvet was quick to say: “It would be very myopic not to represent the consumers we serve, and we serve a very broad and diverse range of consumers.”
But Davos also showed Trump’s war against what he later called that “Absolute Nonsense” of “discriminatory” DEI measures cannot be ignored. I didn’t hear a single business leader at the World Economic Forum using language as blunt as Trump’s. But the president’s vow to make America a “merits-based country” was obvious.
“We need to create an environment where people feel included And It must be a meritocracy where everyone has the opportunity to succeed,” said Rich Lesser, global chairman of Boston Consulting Group a forum Event.
Trump’s approach may encourage some business leaders to follow Meta, McDonald’s, Walmart and other major US companies that have already withdrawn their DEI programs in the Trump comeback.
And it’s easy to imagine executives itching to finish the work of houses an order for federal workers to return to their offices five days a week.
But things are more complicated when it comes to Trump’s push to make fossil fuels great again.
Wall Street banks had already pulled out of Net Zero alliances following Trump’s re-election, leading to speculation in Davos that the future may not be bright for banking companies’ sustainability departments.
And a number of executives said privately they could now talk less about planetary savings and more about building “resilience” when it came to their climate work.
But 40 business leaders met in the Swiss ski town to advance movements in their sectors that support and protect nature. “This suggests that there is another side to the ESG backgroun story,” said Jack Hurd, head of nature at the World Economic Forum.
And other executives said years of experience have shown the financial wisdom of carbon-cutting measures.
“From an economic point of view, it is incredibly advantageous,” said Jesper Brodin, managing director of IngKA Group, IKEA’s main dealer, as Davos ended.
Cutting emissions from supply chains and operations had focused attention on resources and costs, which had seen Ingka’s revenue rise 24 percent since 2016 while carbon emissions fell 30 percent, he said.
Andrew Forrest, the Australian billionaire determined to turn his Fortescue Iron Ore Mining Group into a green industry presence, had a similar story. Although he is only a third of the way through his decarbonization plans, he said the economic case for it is clear.
Companies that jumped on the anti-ESG bandwagon and said, “Let’s just go full speed ahead, the iceberg,” he said. “They will be like the Titanic because the climate doesn’t care about our politics and it will get worse.”
