DEI Is Still a Priority Abroad. Global GCs Must Walk a Tightrope

The room buzzed with anticipation earlier this year as Thinkific founder and CEO Greg Smith introduced me to a room of company employees with others tuning in by Zoom. The topic? Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

No, we weren’t in the US. We were approximately 50 kilometers, or 32 miles, north of the US-Canada border in Vancouver, British Columbia. Here, as far as I could tell, all were eager to hear what I had to say.

No one transformed “DEIB” into 2025’s catchall for anything you don’t like. As former President Barack Obama joked recently, the people in power now “never miss a chance to scapegoat minorities and DEI for every problem under the sun,” joking, “You got a flat tire? DEI....Wife mad at you?...DEI.”

The scene at Thinkific was repeated later that day when I addressed a group of Canadian in-house lawyers. Same topic. Same vibe. Their questions were thoughtful. These executives sought creative ideas on how to strengthen their organizations by better creating work environments where employees can be authentic and thus can do their best work.

The Vancouver experience caused me to ponder how countries outside the US—particularly Canada and the EU—view DEIB in 2025. And given a spate of US policies and investigations discouraging DEIB in the workplace, how should US-based global companies navigate a business climate where global markets may have very different views?

US companies facing competing DEIB mandates have sizable commercial interests at stake. A 2024 study determined the largest US companies in the S&P 500 generate 41% of their revenue outside the US. In 2024, US foreign direct investment in Canada was an estimated $459.6 billion and in Europe it reached $3.97 trillion.

Multinational companies have responded differently to these conflicting approaches. Responding to the Trump administration’s mandate, several companies with large non-US operations—such as Target Corp., Walmart Inc., and McDonald’s Corp.—canceled or rolled back their respective DEI policies and frameworks. Other US-based companies with global reach, including Apple Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp., and Coca-Cola Co., maintained or enhanced their DEIB programs earlier this year despite pressure from US federal government regulators.

So let’s look first at Canada. As in the US, Canada has no specific law that requires Canadian companies to have DEIB policies. However, Canadian companies must ensure employees aren’t being discriminated against based on protected characteristics, set forth in provincial human rights legislation (for example, the British Columbia Human Rights Code) and its federal counterpart (the Canadian Human Rights Act). Protected characteristics include race, religion, gender identity or gender expression, age, disability, and sexual orientation.

Similarly, in the EU, most regulation is left to the member countries. But in October, EU Equality Commissioner Hadja Lahbib said in advance of the release of its LGBTQ equality strategy for 2026-2030, that the EU was doubling down on its commitments. The EU also regulates through broader laws such as the AI Act, which prohibits biometric categorization of individuals by sexual orientation.

So what should a US-based corporation with sizable operations outside the US do to implement a real, not performative, commitment to diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging? There is no one-size-fits-all approach to DEIB that makes sense globally, but I got a front row seat to its power more than a quarter century ago.

Back then, I was a deputy general counsel at Dell Computer Corp. (now Dell Technologies Inc.) when I took a business trip to visit several cities in Asia, including Dell’s factory in Penang, Malaysia. The factory had two floors. The bottom floor was where personal computers and other hardware were assembled; the top floor housed the management team.

On the bottom floor, virtually every factory worker was native Malaysian. Everyone in management, all located on the top floor, was an expat, mostly ethnic Chinese or White.

Not long after my visit, Dell named its first native Malaysian head of factory operations, Simon Wong. I’m told that not only did the factory floor erupt in thunderous applause when the appointment was announced, but key performance measures such as employee satisfaction, productivity, and employee retention all improved meaningfully. A sense of inclusion and belonging mattered to those factory workers. One of their own had “made” it. And because he did, it was as much a win for Dell as for the Malaysian factory workers.

This episode informed my later aspirations for a workable global DEIB strategy as Starbucks Corp.'s chief legal officer. During the decade I served as Starbucks general counsel, we partnered with University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance to help us create a DEIB framework that could work across our 14 offices around the world.

We learned that cultural diversity requires nuance, but we concluded that every country—and every culture—has marginalized groups. There are those on the “inside” and those on the “outside”; those overtly or otherwise considered “less than.”

We strove to be an employer that, regardless of cultural barriers that make getting hired or being your best in the workplace more difficult, if you had the talent, we wanted your talent to soar with us. That commitment transcended Seattle, Toronto, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Shanghai, and everywhere else we had offices.

That’s one reason that for a decade, I interviewed every candidate finalist applying for a job in law and corporate affairs and asked that candidate to share their diversity story. I wanted them to know that before they said yes, diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging were real, global, and fuel for success.

Assuming that commitment, how do US-based multinational companies navigate laws and regulatory frameworks of governments—including the US in 2025—that are hostile to DEIB, while also complying with government mandates, like that of the EU, for which DEIB is measured and mandated by law? Some companies, such as McDonald’s, will take a “when in Rome” approach, giving its businesses autonomy to be one thing in US while being another elsewhere. Others, such as Costco, will hold fast to its DEIB values around the globe, regardless of a change in US government commitment.

Assuming Deutsche Bank AG CEO Christian Sewing is acting in the best interest of his company’s customers, employees, shareholders, and other stakeholders by standing “firmly behind” its DEIB practices, and Costco, supported by its shareholders, is too, the most enterprising companies will find creative ways to thread a needle admittedly made more narrow in 2025.

US Army Airborne veteran Paula Boggs is now a musician, speaker, and writer after serving a decade as Starbucks Corporation’s chief legal officer. She writes about leadership, legal ethics, and the legal profession for Good Counsel.