Scholars seek a look inside the room where DEI rollback decisions happen — Scholar Q&A with Weiting Tao

Over the past few years, DEI programs have garnered intense political and regulatory pushback, forcing many organizations to rethink, rename or roll back commitments. Scholars Weiting Tao, Dongya Wang and Hui Shi, University of Miami; Cen “April” Yue, Boston University; and Jeongwon Yang, University of Miami are leading a Page Center–funded project to examine how communication leaders can navigate this moment. In this Q&A, Tao discusses the shifting DEI landscape, learning what happens “in the room” when rollbacks are decided, and how she hopes the project will generate guidance for communicators. The project is part of the Page Center’s 2026 Call for Ethics of Generative AI in Public Communication.

A lot has changed in the corporate advocacy space, especially with DEI, over the past few years. How do you as scholars adjust to that?

Well, when it comes to political and societal expectations, there’s been a huge shift in corporate cultures. With DEI, there was a strong push from the Biden administration to incorporate those initiatives, but the current president’s executive order pushed it all in the opposite direction. It's like, a few years ago, "This is our value," and now we're going to do away with that. We feel like the change in DEI is the most challenging issue organizations face nowadays. Practitioners really need guidance on staying true to the organization’s values while making sure it’s compliant with those political pressures and shareholder expectations.

Talk about what you’ve been seeing regarding these changes.

Through our research and from reading the news, we see the different ways organizations are reacting. Some of them just pull back all of a sudden. They don’t want anything to do with it. Some are trying to do it more strategically or tactfully. They rename their initiatives. For example, instead of DEI, they may call it a “culture of belonging.” Or they keep the initiatives but scale them back with fewer resources and personnel. The biggest challenge is that no matter which form they choose, they must have a very good rationale and a good communication strategy to explain those rationales to stakeholders. It can’t just be, “This is canceled. We’re not doing it anymore.”

How do these corporate changes relate to your Page Center project?

As researchers, we’re all external to these organizations. What we hear from Target, Amazon and other big brands is what they allow us to see as an external audience. We don’t really know what is going on internally and what’s driving these decisions and the way they communicate with internal and external stakeholders. We want to find out. Especially for PR and communication leaders, what role do they play in this process? Who is in the room when these decisions are made? Is the PR or communications function given a voice? Why do they adopt certain communication strategies? How do they anticipate pressures from internal stakeholders, and how do they justify competing interests? We want to know what happens inside the organization before they publish that press release or statement about their DEI-related decisions.

Walk us through your project. What’s the timeline?

We have two phases: the interview phase and the survey phase. We’re developing an interview protocol this summer, and we’re planning to conduct the interviews this fall. We plan to complete the interview phase by the end of this year. Next spring, once we have all the results from the interviews, we’ll expand on them with a survey with PR managers and leaders, with a broader national sample. That survey phase is expected to be complete by the end of spring.

What do you expect from your results in terms of practical takeaways and insights that communicators can use?

We want to offer three things to professionals. First, we want to establish a decision-making framework that communicators can use, especially when they need to address a politically sensitive crisis such as a DEI rollback or another drastic organizational change. The second thing is we want to develop guidance on internal communication strategies – what needs to be said and how to say it. And third, we want to offer insights that organizations can use to support their communication leadership as well, because not every employee and not every leader is impacted the same way by the DEI rollback.

How does the Page Center's grant support this project and help make your research happen?

The very obvious one is the financial support that makes it possible, and I really like the consistent theme from the Page Center that shows its dedication to ethical discussions. For me personally, the blogs and especially the Research Roundtables* we do are extremely helpful. They add credibility to our project.

*The Research Roundtable is an annual meeting where scholars present their research ideas to the Page Center Advisory Board.