While some of America’s most powerful companies have rolled back their DEI initiatives over the past year, investors are rejecting anti-DEI proposals in overwhelming numbers.
This week, shareholders at Apple and John Deere voted against anti-DEI propositions by a margin of 97.3% and 98.7% respectively. They follow in the footsteps of a Costco vote last month, in which investors voted against an anti-DEI initiative by a margin of 98%.
“Shareholders understand that diversity and inclusion are material to profitable growth,” Andrew Behar, CEO of As You Sow, a shareholder activist group, said in a statement following the John Deere vote earlier this week. “Anyone who’s looking at the data, which the companies and shareholders are, comes to the conclusion that greater diversity leads to financial outperformance.”
Nell Minow, the vice chair of Value Edge Advisors, which advises large institutional investors on corporate governance issues, agrees with that sentiment. “This is literally a market test, and it shows that investors support diverse organizations because they make more money,” she tells Fortune. Minow adds that it’s not unusual for shareholder votes to take a few years to gain traction, and support can build up slowly over a few years. But the miniscule number won by the latest anti-DEI votes doesn’t bode well for their future success. “These don’t seem to be getting any traction whatsoever,” she says.
The voting results at all three companies are similar to outcomes seen in previous years for previous anti-DEI shareholder resolutions. Anti-DEI proposals typically don’t attract more than 2% of shareholders’ support, according to data from the Conference Board, a research nonprofit.
Shareholder votes are normally niche affairs followed by a small subset of the business world. However, recent pressure on companies to retreat from diversity measures has brought added attention to those proposals this year, with diversity and inclusion advocates watching to see how companies and investors respond to shareholder campaigns. That pivot began in earnest after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning affirmative action in the college admissions process in 2023, and has accelerated this year after a series of executive actions specifically targeting DEI in both the public and private sector. Companies rolling back their DEI initiatives include major retailers such as Walmart and Target, as well as tech behemoths like Meta and Google.
The votes at Apple and John Deere this week suggest that Costco was not an outlier. It’s worth noting, however, that investor enthusiasm for activist proposals in general is on the decline. Shareholder activism resolutions rose from 206 proposals in 2021 to 411 in 2024, according to data from The Conference Board and ESGAUGE. But support among shareholders dropped over that time period from 57% to 38%. Experts say that many companies and institutional investors are reporting “proposal fatigue,” especially when it comes to ESG topics.
“Investors and asset managers and proxy advisors have become a little bit more skeptical of some of the proposals coming through,” Andrew Jones, senior researcher at the Conference Board’s ESG Center, tells Fortune. “There’s a recent perception shared by a lot of companies that many proposals are very prescriptive and often meddling in the everyday operations of the company. Or even redundant.”
The resolution submitted to John Deere by the National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) requested that the company produce a report on its racial and gender hiring statistics, in an effort to ensure that white applicants are not being discriminated against in the hiring process. The company urged shareholders to vote against the resolution in its 2025 proxy statement, saying that it already provides investors with workforce composition data, and that the company is “committed to treating our employees, who propel us toward achieving our business ambitions, fairly and inclusively.”
The proposal rejected by Apple shareholders was introduced by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), and took a more general approach, requesting that Apple cease its DEI efforts, citing the risk of “litigation, reputational, and financial risks” to the company. Apple also recommended that shareholders vote against the proposal, arguing that it “inappropriately restricts Apple’s ability to maintain its own business operations” and that the company already has a “well established compliance program” that regularly assesses legal and regulatory risks.
Both companies have faced mounting scrutiny over the past year from anti-DEI activists, but only John Deere has publicly acquiesced to the pressure so far. In July of last year, the farm equipment manufacturer announced that it would no longer be participating in or supporting “cultural awareness parades, festivals, or events,” like Pride, following an online campaign by conservative influencer Robby Starbuck. The company also promised to remove “socially motivated messages” from all-company mandated training materials.
