Wall Street Talked Endlessly About Diversity. Trump Ended That.

Goldman Sachs will drop a demand that corporate boards of directors include women and members of minority groups as financial firms backpedal from D.E.I. promises.

Wall Street has not typically been accused of doing too much for women and minority groups. The financial services industry, after all, is one in which more major banks are named after the Morgan family than led by a female chief executive.

So it meant something over the past half-decade or so when the biggest names in finance said, over and over again, that they would pour dollars and effort into lending to, hiring, promoting and working with underserved communities.

And it means something else now, as many of those much-promoted policies and practices are being scrubbed to be sure they don’t wind up in the cross hairs of the Trump administration’s campaign against diversity, equity and inclusion.

The retreat includes white-collar investment banks, consultancies, mutual funds and stock exchanges. The latest was Goldman Sachs, which said on Tuesday that it would drop a quota that forced corporate boards of directors to include women and members of minority groups. Others on Wall Street are curtailing efforts to recruit Black and Latino employees.

One international bank, BNP Paribas, even hit the brakes on programming new events for next month’s International Women’s Day.

This pullback has thus far been less overt than, say, in the technology industry, whose executives have made public displays of their support for President Trump’s anti-diversity initiatives. And some financial firms had started to make changes long before the election — opening programs aimed at minority candidates to all, for example.