Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI)

Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is a conceptual framework held by many organizations. It promotes the fair treatment and full participation of all individuals. DEI is increasingly under attack.

How Can Feminists Advance Racial Equity in a Post-DEI World? Join Book Talk With Ralina L. Joseph [Sept. 10 @ Ms. HQ in LA]

PUBLISHED 9/2/2026 by

As attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion intensify across the U.S., how can feminists deepen their commitment to racial justice—and sustain that work without succumbing to exhaustion?

On Thursday, Sept. 10, at 6 p.m., Ms. will welcome author and scholar Ralina L. Joseph for a special evening examining the interconnectedness of race, equity and feminism. Joseph will discuss her new book, Racial Exhaustion: How to Move Through Racism in the Wake of DEI, in conversation with Sarah Banet-Weiser, dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.

The event is at Ms. magazine headquarters: 433 S. Beverly Drive, Beverly Hills, Calif. RSVP today!

Another Blow to Women’s Equality at Work: The Trump Administration Is Trying to Weaken a Key Workplace Discrimination Protection

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

The Trump administration is attempting to weaken one of the nation’s most important workplace discrimination protections—a legal standard that has, for decades, allowed workers to challenge hiring and promotion policies that unfairly exclude qualified people, even when those policies appear neutral on their face.

A new opinion from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), issued in June, argues these longstanding interpretations of Title VII’s “disparate-impact” standard are unconstitutional, and contends certain Equal Employment Opportunity Commission guidance improperly allows employers to be held liable based on discriminatory effects rather than intent. The opinion is meant to guide executive branch enforcement.

Civil rights advocates are pushing back, arguing the new OLC opinion misstates decades of Supreme Court precedent and congressional action.

Below is a joint explainer—issued by the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), Democracy Forward, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), Equal Rights Advocates, and LatinoJustice PRLDEF—originally published as “The Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinion on the ‘Constitutionality of Disparate-Impact Liability Under Title VII’: What You Need to Know.”

The organizations argue that the opinion does not change federal law. Instead, they emphasize that only Congress can amend Title VII and that courts—not the executive branch—determine how the law is interpreted. Employers, they say, remain legally obligated to comply with existing anti-discrimination protections.

“Across America, workers are struggling to find living-wage jobs to support themselves and their families. Too often, qualified workers are blocked from getting hired and promoted due to employer policies that screen out applicants based on factors unrelated to whether the applicant could do the job, from unnecessary college degree requirements and credit checks to commute-radius limitations and AI resume reviews. The Trump-Vance administration is making this problem worse.

“For decades, under Supreme Court precedent, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Title VII), and other legal authority, workers have been able to challenge exclusionary policies like these using a legal tool known as “disparate-impact liability.” That tool has resulted in employers adopting more thoughtful, rigorous standards in evaluating their own selection criteria and advancing their business objectives. The administration is now attacking this tool, encouraging employers to ignore the harms caused by their own policies while denying workers the ability to question whether those policies are justified and fair.

“In its latest move, the Trump-Vance administration’s Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) released an opinion claiming that longstanding U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) guidance on disparate-impact liability under Title VII is unconstitutional. The OLC opinion is wrong on the facts and wrong on the law. Only Congress and the courts have authority to change the law or its impact.”

How the Manhattan Institute Turned Anti-LGBTQ+ Politics Into Conservative Policy

PUBLISHED 6/21/2026 by

The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, best known as a Reaganomics champion, is using anti-LGBTQ+ politics to advance its broader political goals. But that wasn’t always part of its strategy.

Since its founding nearly 50 years ago, MI has influenced conservative policy by crafting model legislation and publishing reports for lawmakers and lobbyists. Some of its longtime goals have included promoting libertarian economic policies, discrediting teachers unions and deregulating healthcare. Funded primarily by conservatives on Wall Street, MI has over $30 million in net assets as of its most recent tax filings.

Prior to the 2020s, efforts to undermine LGBTQ+ rights were not a focus for MI. But since then, it began parroting many of the talking points of the anti-LGBTQ+ movement.

While the shift may seem random, an assessment of MI’s history and strategy reveals how these attacks fit into its broader political goals.

America’s Medical Research System Has Been Failing Women for Generations

PUBLISHED 6/11/2026 by and

For decades, women have been systematically excluded, overlooked and underfunded by America’s scientific and medical institutions—and the consequences are measurable. Women were not required to be included in federally funded clinical research until 1993, and even today, no more than 8.8 percent of NIH grant spending goes toward women’s health research. The result is a dangerous knowledge gap that affects everything from cardiovascular disease and autoimmune disorders to drug safety, maternal health and reproductive care.

The problem transcends partisan politics. While the Trump administration’s cuts to women’s health research have intensified concerns, Democratic and Republican administrations alike have failed to prioritize women’s health.

Private philanthropy and venture capital have also fallen short, with women’s health receiving just a fraction of available funding.

As women face rising healthcare deserts, worsening maternal mortality rates and persistent gaps in diagnosis and treatment, meaningful progress will require action on every front—from federal investment and philanthropy to innovative new funding models focused specifically on women’s health research.

Three Ways Trump’s Weird Fixation on DEI Is Hurting Women

PUBLISHED 5/28/2026 by

The Trump administration’s obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion has moved far beyond rhetoric. It is now reshaping how women’s stories get told, whose health crises are allowed to be named, and what kinds of research are permitted to survive.

Across history, healthcare and science, women are watching decades of hard-fought progress become collateral damage in a culture war designed to erase people in real time.

That damage is already visible.

Republicans derailed long-awaited progress on the American Women’s History Museum by inserting provisions policing which women count as women and handing Trump appointees sweeping control over the museum itself.

Meanwhile, the newly reintroduced Momnibus legislation—created in response to the maternal mortality crisis devastating Black women and families—has been forced to strip much of the word “Black” from its language in order to survive politically under an administration openly hostile to DEI initiatives.

And the consequences are not abstract: NIH grants focused on women’s health have reportedly dropped by 30 percent, while words like “women” and “gender” themselves are becoming liabilities in funding proposals.

Women’s health was already chronically underfunded and misunderstood long before Trump returned to office. But the administration’s escalating war on DEI is accelerating that neglect—and making clear just how much is at stake when political ideology begins dictating whose lives deserve to be studied, protected and remembered.

When Mothers Speak, Medicine Must Listen

PUBLISHED 5/7/2026 by

When my daughter was 2 weeks old, she stopped eating. She would go nearly 24 hours without food, crying constantly and losing weight while seeming to be in excruciating pain. Over five months, I took her to more than 50 doctors appointments searching for answers, only to be dismissed as hysterical, hormonal or “over-medicalizing” my baby.

By the time doctors finally recognized that she was suffering from a milk allergy and reflux, the prolonged pain had caused bottle aversion—a life-threatening condition in which babies become too traumatized to eat. She was later diagnosed with ARFID, a trauma-based eating disorder that still affects her today.

What happened to my daughter forced me to confront a devastating question: Would we have been treated differently if I weren’t a woman of color? Research has repeatedly shown that Black women and children are less likely to have their pain taken seriously by medical providers, and over the last decade, federal programs aimed at identifying and addressing those disparities began making meaningful progress. But under the Trump administration, many of those initiatives are being dismantled in the name of fighting “DEI,” with funding slashed, bias training suspended and research into racial disparities frozen or erased altogether.

My daughter is now in preschool—playing, laughing and growing—but she still struggles to eat enough to meet her nutritional needs.

Our story is not an isolated tragedy; it is a warning about what happens when healthcare systems stop listening to mothers and when political attacks on equity research blind medicine to its own biases. If we truly value mothers and children, we cannot treat efforts to understand racial disparities in healthcare as expendable.

Could This Be the Last Women’s History Month?

PUBLISHED 3/27/2026 by

Since 1987, the United States has celebrated Women’s History Month every March.

We have used this month to correct the record. To make sure that the women who built this nation—who are often systematically written out of history books and erased from the stories we tell ourselves about who we are—are named out loud and recognized. It is a national reminder that women are not a footnote to the American project. We are central to it.

But today, just shy of its 40th anniversary, Women’s History Month celebrations are quietly disappearing. Not because communities stopped caring—but because an administration decided that honoring women is a threat.

Harriet Tubman did not free herself and stop. Fannie Lou Hamer did not survive a Mississippi jail cell to just go home. Shirley Chisholm did not run for president, unbought and unbossed, so that we could sit down now.

It’s up to us now to saddle up and make sure that future generations of women and girls can not only know about the incredible shared history of the bad ass women that helped shape the world, but can feel the full freedom of it—which means we now have work to do. 

We ride at dawn.

How U.S. Tried but Failed to Wipe Out 70 Years of Global Consent on Women’s Rights

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

The United States set a new precedent at the United Nations annual women’s rights meeting by requesting a recorded vote on the draft conclusions. The U.S. action culminated after weekslong negotiations on this year’s theme, “Ensuring and Strengthening Access to Justice for All Women and Girls.”

The move—which failed drastically—reflects the continuing assault of the Trump administration on gender equality worldwide, yet resistance from across the world couldn’t be more profound.

The Heritage Foundation’s New Policy Guidebook Wants to Push Women Out of Public Life

PUBLISHED 3/13/2026 by

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the right-wing Heritage Foundation—developers of Project 2025, the policy guidebook written to influence the Trump administration’s legislative priorities—has issued a 168-page position paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”

The document is intended to “restore the family,” by elevating a male-led, heterosexual model of social relations. 

The report is both absurd and terrifying—which is why the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) is sounding an alarm about it. Emily Martin, the NWLC’s chief program officer and Amy Matsui, its vice president of childcare and income security, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader about “Saving America by Saving the Family” in late February.