Accountancy firm Deloitte may have cancelled its diversity and inclusion programming in the United States, but the Bermuda office is sticking to its guns.

“We are committed to continuously enhancing our talent experience by fostering an inclusive culture that helps all our people thrive, reach their full potential and that reflects the diversity of our society,” a spokesman for the firm said.

While some companies are cloaking the language around DEI, or quietly removing it from their literature or websites, Deloitte in Bermuda said they would continue to use the same language around DEI.

One in eight firms in the US, including giants Walmart, Google and IBM, plan to either cancel or reduce funding for DEI this year. Some are choosing to move money from DEI into artificial intelligence implementation.

The executive director of Citizens Uprooting Racism in Bermuda has seen a shift when it comes to DEI in Bermuda.

“I have heard of people wanting to change the language of what DEI looks like,” Stacey-Lee Williams said. “I have heard of people wanting to call DEI ‘Belonging’ or something like that.”

Some diversity-related educational conferences she attended for years in the US have been cancelled or put on hold.

American president Donald Trump has been blamed by some people for the shift. When he took office last November one of his first acts was to end affirmative action in federal contracting and put all federal DEI staff on paid leave to be eventually laid off.

Ms Williams is not so sure of this.

“You could feel a change in the air prior to Trump getting in,” Ms Williams said. “You could feel there was push back.”

After Black Lives Matter protests in May 2020, Curb received a flood of support.

“Suddenly, people understood,” she said. “Firms were saying they were setting up DEI committees.”

Ms Williams questions if some of that was performative.

“You don’t see that support as strong today as it was then,” she said. “DEI is the right thing to do. If there is any push back, I want to ask what it is about diversity the company does not support?”

One high-level insurance executive in Bermuda is determined that her company will hold on to its DEI projects.

Not wishing to be named, she said: “If we were to back off on these initiatives now, that would state that we never truly believed in them.”

For her it was not just about doing the right thing, but about improving the bottom line.

Research has found firms with DEI programmes are 38 per cent more profitable than those without.

“The fact that these companies have backed off DEI means they were only doing it because they thought shareholders wanted them to,” the executive said.

Her company’s DEI approach was one of the things that attracted her to it in the first place.

Crystal Clay, a diversity expert at Olive Branch Consulting, said Bermuda has felt the ripple effects of Mr Trump’s stance on DEI.

“Many of our companies are global and influenced by shifting corporate policies and leadership cultures that span borders,” she said.

Ms Clay said equitable and inclusive workplaces are not political. “They are foundational to business success, innovation and employee wellbeing.“

She said the language around DEI may be quieter, but progressive companies want the best people for the right reasons.

“Conscious leaders are intentional about embedding objectivity into systems,” she said. “They do not perform inclusion. They practise it. At the end of the day the goal remains the same: to create workplaces where everyone is valued, heard and able to thrive.”