UnitedHealth removes mentions of DEI from its website
UnitedHealth Group has scrubbed a lot of its web site mentioning its variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) insurance policies, together with flattening weblog posts and eradicating giant sections from its web site, TechCrunch has discovered.
In keeping with archived copies of UnitedHealth’s web site, a number of of the corporate’s internet pages devoted to DEI no longer load and now redirect to a “web page not discovered” error. A piece of the corporate’s profession web page that used to have a devoted part for variety, fairness, and inclusion, together with its variety initiatives, no longer appears on the identical dwell web page. UnitedHealth additionally removed a 2022 blog post that includes a dialog with its vice chairman of DEI.
It’s not clear why UnitedHealth pulled down the pages, and if it represents a shift of verbiage or an precise change in its insurance policies. UnitedHealth spokesperson Tyler Mason didn’t return requests for remark Wednesday.
The elimination of DEI from UnitedHealth’s web sites coincides with a broad retreat from DEI policies and programs by family names and tech corporations alike, amid mounting stress from Trump administration-issued government orders focusing on DEI packages.
In February, U.S. Lawyer Common Pam Bondi instructed the Justice Division to “examine, eradicate, and penalize” DEI packages that it considers unlawful at non-public sector corporations that obtain federal funding. A federal appeals court docket quickly allowed the Trump administration to press ahead, regardless of a decrease court docket ruling the federal government’s efforts illegal.
A number of tech corporations have already scrubbed mentions of DEI from their web sites, together with Google and OpenAI.
TechCrunch noticed UnitedHealth take down its internet pages mentioning DEI all through Wednesday morning in actual time. For the reason that ransomware attack on Change Healthcare last year, TechCrunch has used an online web page monitor to mechanically and regularly test for any adjustments to its web site, corresponding to updates to its data breach notice.
In eradicating “Variety, Fairness and Inclusion” in UnitedHealth’s web site menu, the corporate added a slimmed-down web page with weaker language it calls the “Culture of Belonging,” which leaves out earlier references to the corporate’s variety efforts on college campuses, variety in recruiting, and the corporate’s varied worker useful resource teams.
