For years, LinkedIn profiles loaded up with diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) language. Then, early in 2025, users started quietly erasing it from jobs they had already left.
The drop came after President Donald Trump returned to office and signed Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 dismantling federal DEI programs and squeezing federal contractors. Additions of “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “DEI” to old LinkedIn jobs fell sharply during the same period.
And these were old jobs.
A new National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper tracked monthly changes to 29.4 million U.S. LinkedIn profiles from August 2020 through January 2026. Co-authors Nicholas Bloom, Gideon Moore, Lisa K. Simon, and Caelan Wilkie-Rogers focused on changes people made to jobs they had already left.
Read More: DEI Gets Its Pink Slip: Trump Dumps Race-Based Federal Hiring Rules
Researchers excluded edits made within 60 days of someone leaving a job.
Someone still at a job may pick up new duties and update LinkedIn. The 60-day cutoff screened out much of that. Many of the edits the researchers studied came years later.
The job is over. The résumé is being rewritten.
About 19.7 percent of the established LinkedIn users in the sample changed at least one of their previous titles or job descriptions. The median edit came 4.5 years after they left the position.
The researchers call them “time travelers.”
Their explanation for why people do it is less exotic:
“Workers modify their résumé to reflect what they believe employers want to hear.”
There is some evidence for that in when the edits happen. Workers who later changed employers were already more than twice as likely to revise an old job a year before making the move. Editing increased again during the final six months before the job change, eventually reaching about 2.4 percent compared with 1.1 percent a year earlier.
Cleaning up LinkedIn before a job search is routine. These users were going back and changing jobs that had ended years earlier.
DEI terms were generally being added to old jobs during the first part of the decade. The trend weakened during 2024 and then dropped much more sharply at the beginning of 2025, right around Trump’s return to office.
The authors specifically note the two Trump executive orders in discussing the decline. Those orders targeted federal DEI programs and, in the case of Executive Order 14173, pushed changes involving federal contractors.
The LinkedIn data show people changing their own language at roughly the same time.
“Here we find workers removing diversity from their job descriptions—without any changes in the underlying jobs being described.”
Those old jobs did not change in 2025. A meeting from 2019 was long over, as was an initiative from 2021. The edit was to what a recruiter would see years later on LinkedIn.
Corporate references to diversity had been climbing for years, far faster than workplace diversity actually changed. The authors cite previous research finding that companies increased their discussion of diversity fivefold between 2008 and 2021, while real workplace diversity barely budged. It was always more performance than progress. Now even the performance is being walked back.
The DEI retreat is part of a broader pattern. After ChatGPT's release in late 2022, retroactive additions of "AI," "GPT," "LLM," and "artificial intelligence" rose more than sixfold, added to jobs that in many cases predated ChatGPT entirely. Remote-work language followed the same logic in reverse, declining as return-to-office mandates spread. Workers are reading the room, then rewriting the past.
The authors make no claim that scrubbing DEI language actually improves hiring outcomes; that question remains open. The paper is an NBER working paper and has not been peer-reviewed.
By January 2026, users were still rewriting jobs they had left years earlier. DEI was worth bragging about; that has changed.
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