Most-clicked story of the week
At the American Bar Association’s Labor & Employment Law conference, a case involving a Coca-Cola bottler’s women leadership retreat was cited multiple times by speakers concerning the future of diversity, equity and inclusion programming within organizations. The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission brought the case on behalf of a male charging party who alleged he was discriminated against due to his exclusion from the event. Notably, lawyers did not advise retreating from those programs but rather reassessing and expanding them.
Number of the week: 3
The number of Republican commissioners that will serve on the EEOC if President Donald Trump’s latest nominee, Matthew Zandi, is confirmed. Zandi was tapped to fill the vacant spot left by former Commissioner Jocelyn Samuels, who was controversially fired by Trump at the beginning of his term.
What we didn’t get to
Here are a few stories that grabbed HR Dive’s attention but didn’t quite make it to the newsletter last week.
AI may give HR a way to root out manager bias
Recent survey results released Thursday by HiBob, an HCM platform, revealed that artificial intelligence tools have assisted HR professionals in evaluating promotion decisions and in challenging managers on their decision-making.
More than half of HR managers who use AI to review workforce decisions said they reconsidered overlooked workers for promotion, while 73% said they used information provided by the tool to explain to a manager why they may want to reconsider a personnel decision they made — including those that may have been informed by bias, HiBob said.
Notably, 43% of respondents said AI review of a decision ended with an employee receiving a “more favorable” outcome on pay raises; 40% said the same regarding promotion.
1 in 5 jobs may be transformed by 2030, Gartner says
In 2026, companies opted to defer the creation of close to 1.3 million jobs, one of the more significant impacts on the job market, Gartner said in research released Tuesday. By 2030, a total of 5 million people may have experienced job deferral due to businesses postponing the creation of new jobs.
“Deferred jobs are not the same as lost jobs. They simply aren’t created,” John Lovelock, distinguished VP analyst and chief of research at Gartner, said at a Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo event — pointing to the way AI is changing how workforces are rebalanced.
Amid all of these shifts, more than 20% of workers “will have to adapt to the new shape of work in their jobs, changing what they do, how they do it, and where their responsibilities stop and end,” Gartner said.
These effects are also not evenly distributed.
“The worst mistake that a business and IT executive can make is to apply lessons from one industry or role to another which can lead to poor errors in judgment and missed targets,” Helen Poitevin, distinguished VP analyst at Gartner, said at the event.
Quote of the week
“This is not a new story. We’ve been here a long time.”
Stacy Hawkins
Professor of law, Rutgers University
The elements of DEI have often gone through periods of backlash only to reemerge and continue, Hawkins explained at ABA LEL. While the Trump administration may seek to eliminate what it calls “illegal DEI,” such programming on its own typically lacks a definition and has not been outlawed. Employers should examine their programs that may hew closer to concepts that have been scrutinized, however, including anything that may resemble affirmative action.
