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The HRC Corporate Equality Index Dropouts: 2024-2025

Dozens of major US employers stopped participating in HRC's Corporate Equality Index in 2024-25. What the CEI scores and what dropping out changes.

By The WokeCorp Team
Pride flag draped over a corporate office building entrance
Workplace pride signage, 2023. · Photo via Unsplash. Unsplash License (CC0).

Between June 2024 and January 2025, at least 14 large US employers either publicly withdrew from the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index or quietly stopped participating in the annual survey. The CEI is the dominant US rating for LGBTQ+ workplace policies. It scores employers 0-100 on non-discrimination policies, benefits, internal culture, and external engagement. Companies that hit 100 receive HRC's "Equality 100" designation, which has been a standard line item in corporate ESG reports for two decades. The CEI score also feeds the social pillar of major ESG ratings products, which means the rating has institutional-investor weight beyond the symbolic value of the badge.

HRC's 2025 CEI Report acknowledged the wave indirectly, noting that "some companies have issued public and employee communications backpedaling on previously established commitments to inclusion." The report still rated 1,449 employers and awarded 765 perfect scores. The dropouts didn't break the program. They did change what participation signals.

Key Findings

  • The HRC Corporate Equality Index scores US employers on a 100-point scale across four categories: workforce protections, inclusive benefits, supporting an inclusive culture, and corporate social responsibility.
  • At least 14 major US companies publicly walked back DEI commitments tied to CEI participation between June 2024 and January 2025, including Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Ford, Lowe's, Brown-Forman, Caterpillar, Toyota, Boeing, Walmart, McDonald's, and Meta.
  • Many of the dropouts had previously held perfect 100 scores and used the "Best Places to Work for LGBTQ+ Equality" designation in recruiting materials and ESG reports.
  • HRC's 2025 CEI Report rated 1,449 companies and awarded 765 perfect scores, a 28% increase over the prior year, indicating the program retained majority participation despite the high-profile exits.
  • The CEI score factors into ESG ratings products from MSCI, Sustainalytics, and Bloomberg, giving the rating institutional-investor weight beyond its symbolic function.
  • Most dropouts named "alignment with core business" or post-SFFA legal review as the rationale, not opposition to the program's substance. The pattern matches the broader great DEI retreat of 2024-25.

What is the HRC Corporate Equality Index?

The Human Rights Campaign Foundation has published the CEI annually since 2002. The first edition rated 319 employers; 13 hit a perfect score. By the 2026 report, participation had grown to 1,450 companies with 765 perfect scores. For most of those 24 years, the score climbed monotonically. The CEI was the rare ESG-adjacent rating where the bar moved up and corporate compliance moved up with it.

The scoring categories in the current methodology:

| Category | Points | What it measures | |---|---|---| | Workforce Protections | 30 | Non-discrimination policies covering sexual orientation and gender identity | | Inclusive Benefits | 30 | Healthcare, family-formation, and partner benefits parity | | Supporting Inclusive Culture | 40 | Training, employee resource groups, data collection, supplier programs, philanthropy | | Responsible Citizenship | -25 | Deductions for documented anti-LGBTQ+ conduct |

A company that scores 100 earns the "Equality 100 Award: Leader in LGBTQ+ Workplace Inclusion." The badge has been treated as table stakes for Fortune 500 ESG reporting for over a decade. Companies cited it in proxy statements, recruiting decks, supplier-onboarding materials, and corporate sustainability reports.

Rainbow pride flag pin on a corporate badge lanyard

The CEI's "Equality 100" designation became a standard line item in corporate sustainability reports. Companies used the rating in recruiting, supplier onboarding, and proxy statements. Walking away from the rating removes a credential that had been in active commercial use for years. Photo via Unsplash. Unsplash License (CC0).

Why is the CEI the focal point of DEI rollbacks?

Three structural reasons.

First, the CEI is the most visible single artifact of corporate LGBTQ+ programming. A company doesn't have to disclose its full DEI training curriculum to be on the CEI. It just has to answer the survey. That visibility cuts both ways. The badge is easy to brag about and easy to attack.

Second, the CEI feeds the social pillar of major ESG ratings products. MSCI ESG Ratings, Sustainalytics, and Bloomberg's ESG scores all incorporate LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion signals, and the CEI is the dominant US-specific input. A drop from 100 to 0 (the score for non-participating companies) can move a company's social-pillar subscore, which can affect index inclusion decisions for ESG-flagged funds. The CEI isn't just a values statement. It's a rating with downstream financial plumbing, in the same way ESG rating agencies more broadly drive passive fund allocation.

Third, the CEI is a category the conservative activist Robby Starbuck playbook specifically targets. Starbuck's campaigns against Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, and others cited CEI participation as evidence of "woke" corporate policy. Surface the public CEI score, share it with the customer base, wait for the commercial reaction. The CEI was the cleanest signal to cite because HRC publishes the full participant list and the scores.

Who dropped out in 2024-25?

The dropout wave broke into the open in June 2024 and continued through early 2025. The companies below either confirmed withdrawal in public statements or were widely reported as having ended participation.

| Company | Date | Prior CEI score (last known) | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | Tractor Supply | June 2024 | 100 | First major rollback of the wave; ended ERGs and supplier targets too | | John Deere | July 2024 | 100 | Ended "social or cultural awareness" event sponsorships | | Harley-Davidson | August 2024 | 100 | Statement specifically named CEI withdrawal | | Lowe's | August 2024 | 100 | Combined ERGs, ended HRC survey response | | Ford | August 2024 | 100 | Internal memo cited "shifting external and internal" landscape | | Brown-Forman (Jack Daniel's parent) | August 2024 | 100 | Ended supplier diversity targets and CEI participation together | | Caterpillar | August 2024 | Top tier | Removed DEI language, ended CEI survey | | Toyota | October 2024 | 100 | Ended "narrow scope" event sponsorships, redirected community giving | | Boeing | October 2024 | 100 | Dissolved central DEI department | | Walmart | November 2024 | 100 | Largest US private employer; ended CEI participation explicitly | | McDonald's | January 2025 | 100 | Cited SFFA Supreme Court ruling; retired "aspirational" representation goals | | Meta | January 2025 | 100 | Ended DEI team; rolled back hateful-conduct policy enforcement | | Stanley Black & Decker | 2024 | 100 | Reported as ending CEI participation in trade press | | Molson Coors | September 2024 | 100 | Ended CEI participation and supplier diversity targets |

The list is not exhaustive. Trade-press reporting through Q1 2025 identified additional industrial and consumer-goods participants that had quietly stopped responding to the survey without issuing statements. HRC's 2025 report noted that 1,449 companies participated, against 1,384 in the 2023-24 report (the previous comparable cycle), meaning gross participation rose even as identifiable exits got media attention. Net, more new companies opted in than opted out. The exits were concentrated in highly visible Fortune 100 names.

Corporate boardroom with executives reviewing reports

For most dropouts, the public rationale was post-SFFA legal review and "alignment with core business," not opposition to LGBTQ+ inclusion. The pattern matches the broader corporate-governance retreat from third-party rating program participation across the great DEI retreat. Photo via Pexels. Pexels License.

How did HRC respond?

HRC's 2025 CEI Report addressed the wave but did not name individual dropouts in the report's own headline framing. The report's introduction characterized the dropouts as "backpedaling on previously established commitments to inclusion" and attributed the pressure to "anti-DEI campaigns" that "attempt to misrepresent workplace inclusion efforts." HRC also issued individual press statements as larger withdrawals broke into the news cycle, generally framing each as a capitulation to extremist pressure rather than a legitimate business-strategy decision.

The CEI program itself didn't change methodology meaningfully in 2025. The criteria stayed essentially constant. Participation grew gross. HRC's chosen frame: the program is intact, the standard is durable, and dropouts are loud minority exceptions. Whether that frame survives a 2026 cycle with additional exits is the open question.

What HRC didn't do is also informative. The program didn't lower the bar to retain participants. It didn't water down the "supporting inclusive culture" category that had become legally exposed post-SFFA. It didn't carve out a "scaled-back participation" tier for companies that wanted to keep some signals but drop the supplier-diversity and DEI-training elements that drew the most fire. The 2025 report kept the scoring rubric stable, which means the choice for a company became binary: full participation, including the elements at most legal and commercial risk, or out.

What does dropping out actually change for employees?

In most cases, very little immediately. The CEI scores written policies, not actual workplace climate. A company that withdraws from the CEI typically still has non-discrimination policies covering sexual orientation and gender identity (often required by state or local law anyway), still offers domestic-partner benefits, still maintains existing employee resource groups (even where leadership combined them).

What changes is the corporate commitment to certain visible programs: supplier diversity targets that explicitly include LGBTQ+ owned businesses, "social and cultural awareness" event sponsorships, training programs with specific LGBTQ+ inclusion modules, and external community partnerships that funded HRC and related advocacy organizations. The withdrawals also typically end disclosure of LGBTQ+ representation data in workforce demographics, which removes one of the few data points researchers could use to track outcomes.

For some specific protections that the CEI required for a perfect score (transgender-inclusive healthcare benefits, gender-transition guidelines for managers), the withdrawal doesn't automatically end the benefit. It removes the external scorecard pressure to maintain it. Whether those specific benefits persist depends on whether they were embedded into actual benefits administration or were primarily survey-response policies.

What this tells you

The CEI dropout wave is not, strictly speaking, about LGBTQ+ workplace inclusion. It's about corporate participation in third-party rating programs that score companies on social-pillar criteria. The CEI happened to be the highest-profile target because it was the most visible and because Robby Starbuck's campaign methodology specifically used it as a citation.

The deeper pattern is corporate retreat from any external rating program where participation creates legal exposure (post-SFFA), commercial exposure (consumer activist campaigns), or political exposure (state attorneys general, anti-ESG legislation). The CEI sits at the intersection of all three. So does participation in CDP climate disclosure, Bloomberg ESG ratings, MSCI ESG scores, and the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which has seen its own Wall Street exodus.

What the CEI dropouts tell you about a company is that its risk calculus on third-party rating participation has shifted. A company that adopted the rating during the 2010s expansion of ESG signaling, and dropped out during the 2024-25 retrenchment, was responding to the same incentive in both directions. The rating signaled to institutional investors and ESG raters during the expansion. Dropping the rating signals to consumers and state regulators during the retrenchment. The same companies. The same logic. Different external scorers.

That dynamic also shows up in BlackRock's ESG retreat and the stakeholder capitalism balance sheet more broadly. The 2026 CEI cycle, due in the back half of this year, will be the first one whose participation rate reflects a full year of post-McDonald's, post-Meta dropouts. Whether the program's gross participation continues to climb, plateaus, or contracts is the metric to watch.

Diverse group of professionals standing together against a red background

Diverse group of professionals standing together against a red background. Photo: Theo Decker via Pexels. Pexels License.. Pexels free to use.

The WokeCorp assessment

The commitment. The HRC Corporate Equality Index scores US employers on a 100-point scale across workforce protections (30 pts), inclusive benefits (30 pts), supporting inclusive culture (40 pts), with deductions for documented anti-LGBTQ+ conduct.

The outcomes. At least 14 major US employers walked back DEI commitments tied to CEI participation between June 2024 and January 2025, including Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowe's, Ford, Brown-Forman, Caterpillar, Toyota, Boeing, Walmart, McDonald's, Meta, Stanley Black & Decker, and Molson Coors. HRC's 2025 CEI Report rated 1,449 companies and awarded 765 perfect scores.

The core question. The CEI's influence rested on two things: brand value for companies that participated, and reputational cost for those that didn't. As the political cost of participation rose for some companies and fell for others, the calculus changed. The index is a measure of corporate risk calculation, not a measure of workplace culture.

Compare with Harley-Davidson Drops DEI: A Boycott That Worked.

Sources

Verified May 2026.

  • HRC Corporate Equality Index methodology and criteria, hrc.org/resources/corporate-equality-index
  • HRC 2025 Corporate Equality Index Report, reports.hrc.org/corporate-equality-index-2025
  • Corporate Equality Index history, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_Equality_Index
  • Company withdrawal statements (Tractor Supply, Harley-Davidson, John Deere, Lowe's, Ford, Brown-Forman, Caterpillar, Toyota, Boeing, Walmart, McDonald's, Meta) via investor relations releases, June 2024 through January 2025