It might seem like every company is ditching their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion at the moment, or at least strongly reconsidering them. Corporate leaders have said the threat of being targeted by a federal investigation—per one of Trump’s executive orders on DEI—is keeping them “up at night.” High-profile employers like Meta, Walmart, and McDonald’s have made notable changes to their DEI programs in recent months.
As Fast Company has reported, however, not every company is taking this opportunity to entirely backtrack on DEI efforts. In fact, plenty of employers still seem confident that DEI is a worthwhile undertaking, according to the latest Compensation Best Practices Report from Payscale.
How companies are thinking about DEI
Of the nearly 3,600 companies surveyed, 38% said they are planning to make no changes to their diversity programs, while another 28% claimed to be increasing their commitments. Only 11% admitted they were pulling back on DEI (though another 22% said they did not have any such programs in place). Even as some organizations have scrubbed the term “equity” from their programs, the majority of companies—66%—believed equity should remain a “central pillar” of DEI efforts.
Some experts have worried that political pressure and mounting anti-DEI sentiment might lead companies to make more expansive changes to their programs, even reevaluating pay equity efforts that have become prevalent in the business world. “What we are worried about is people pausing on pay equity work,” Syndio chief legal officer Rob Porcarelli recently told Fast Company. “Some frame pay equity as a women’s issue, and so it gets swept under the umbrella of DEI.”
Pay equity trends in the workplace
According to Payscale data, however, it’s not likely companies will let their pay equity initiatives fall by the wayside, even amid the shifting tides in corporate DEI. Corporate investment in pay equity has largely increased since 2019, when only 38% of companies engaged in this work; by 2022, the share of employers conducting or planning pay equity analyses had jumped to 66%. While interest has fallen slightly since then, the Payscale report found that the majority of companies—57%—remain committed to pay equity efforts in 2025.
That said, there was variation in what companies analyzed as part of pay equity audits. In 2025, more than half are focused on the gender pay gap, though there was a meaningful drop in the share of companies analyzing pay on the basis of gender, from about 71% in 2024 to 57% this year. There was an even greater drop-off for pay equity analysis on the basis of race and ethnicity, from 64% to 45%. (Most employers—72%—also believed that research on the gender pay gap was “meaningful.”)
An increase in pay transparency
In the meantime, however, it seems companies are becoming more candid about pay and compensation, in part because of pay transparency laws that have forced their hand across a number of states. Nearly a third of employers said they were communicating more about their compensation practices, and 56% said they are publishing pay ranges regardless of whether it is mandated by state law (though this figure has dropped from 60% in 2024).
Far more companies are also fielding direct inquiries from their workforce, with a third of them reporting that employees were asking questions about pay—an indication that workers are also taking matters into their own hands, no matter their company’s stance on pay transparency.
No comments