On September 4, 2026, HR Dive recirculated a University of California, Berkeley paper with a headline conservatives were supposed to swallow whole: companies that roll back DEI don't perform better financially. The study, "Markets Do Not Punish Firms for Maintaining DEI," by Hanna Folsz of Stanford and Jacob Grumbach of Berkeley's Goldman School, published August 14. It argues S&P 500 firms that kept diversity programs after President Trump's January 2025 Executive Order 14173 posted stock returns and revenue "indistinguishable" from firms that cut them.
If your only scoreboard is a Bloomberg terminal, that sentence sounds like a mic drop. It isn't. Markets price cash flow. They do not grade whether a company still runs identity hiring, Pride campaigns, or racial-equity pledges. That's what a woke score is for. Apple still scores 100/100 with us. So do Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase. Those are the "keepers" the paper celebrates. Our database did not shrug.
What the paper actually measured
Folsz and Grumbach compared S&P 500 companies after EO 14173 ("Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity"). Their narrowest reaffirmed group of eight, as later coverage in GlobeSt and HR Dive listed it, included Apple, Cisco, Costco, Delta Air Lines, Dollar Tree, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Pfizer. On the other side they cited Citigroup, Dollar General, IBM, Target, and Walmart as firms that scaled back.
They used abnormal stock returns and quarterly revenue. As reported by HR Dive, Grumbach wrote that "large corporations appear to have folded under pressure for no financial gain." CBS News summarized the same claim in August: no detectable difference in abnormal returns or revenue tied to keeping DEI. Attribute that to the authors. It is an observational finance study, not a moral audit, and the paper notes keepers may have differed from peers in ways the models cannot fully isolate.
One number is worth quoting carefully. The study's DEI Watch "committed" bucket is n=54. That is a coding of public commitment, not a census of every HR department in America. Do not flatten it into "DEI is over except 54 companies."
The keepers still score like keepers
Here is the ladder the paper will not print.
- Apple — 100/100, published. ESG reports, Pride collections, and a shareholder vote that crushed an anti-DEI proposal. The study's poster child. Our score did not move because a stock chart was "indistinguishable."
- Microsoft — 100/100, published. Global D&I apparatus, Pride campaigns, perfect CEI history in our scoring notes. Markets can like Azure and still leave the identity machine running.
- JPMorgan Chase — 100/100, published. The nation's largest bank: racial-equity dollars, long Pride sponsorship, and a 100 across our six criteria.
- Cisco Systems — 100/100, published. Another name on the reaffirmed list. Perfect score. No mystery.
- Pfizer — 100/100, published. ESG, DEI, Pride publications. If you needed a reminder that "no financial penalty" is not the same as "not woke," start here.
Now the "kept DEI" names that are not maxed out, because the study treats them as the same political tribe:
- Costco Wholesale — 45/100, published. The paper's favorite warehouse club. Costco publicly reaffirmed DEI. Our score still sits in woke territory, not extremely_woke. That gap is the point: a company can keep a program and not look like Apple.
- Delta Airlines — 52/100, published. Kept DEI per the study. Mid-woke, not a 100. Markets and moral infrastructure are different instruments.
The rollback cohort still looks rolled-forward
This is where the "go woke go broke is a myth" talking point collapses on contact with a scored database.
- Walmart — 90/100, published. Researchers put Walmart in the scaled-back column. Our file still has years of ESG, a $100 million racial-equity commitment in the record, and Platinum-level Pride history. A late-2024 DEI rollback did not wash the score to zero. Rolled back. Still 90.
- Target — 71/100, published. Also listed as a rollback. Also still woke. The Halloween costume fight and the September 2 National Target Boycott presser at HQ are a different story; the score did not become a conservative shopping app because a paper said revenue didn't move.
- Citigroup — 100/100, published. The study cites Citi among firms that scaled back. Our score is still a perfect 100. Title swaps and program trims are not a clean bill, and we will not pretend they are.
- IBM — 90/100, currently in content_review, so do not treat the row as a finished public profile. Listed as a rollback name. Still extremely_woke in our last scored pass, with the usual dual-trap: settlement pressure on one side and reverse-bias suits on the other.
- Dollar General — 45/100, published. The paper's contrast to Dollar Tree. Woke, not extremely_woke. Useful as a control in their finance model. Not a boycott trophy.
Shop non-woke technology brands and non-woke retail brands the same way you shop a receipt: by named scores, not by a campus working paper.
Stock beta is not a woke score
The academic counter-wave has a tell. It measures whether the S&P 500, as a group, punished or rewarded a DEI press release. Index funds do not boycott. Passive capital does not read HRC scorecards. Abnormal returns after an executive order tell you how traders digested political risk over a short window. They do not tell you whether Apple still ships a Pride collection, whether Microsoft still runs a Global D&I shop, or whether JPMorgan still writes racial-equity checks.
BuyWokeFree scores the behavior: ESG reporting, DEI programs, Pride sponsorship, HRC-style indices, political spending, CEO Action-style pledges. Apple is 100 because the conduct is 100. Microsoft is 100. JPMorgan is 100. Costco is 45 because the conduct is 45. Walmart can "end DEI" in a headline and remain 90 because the archive of programs, sponsorships, and reports does not vanish when the slide deck gets renamed "belonging."
If you wanted a one-line falsification of "markets are the scorecard," use this week's other receipt. Nike can sit near multi-year lows while the woke score stays 75. Same logic here. A study can find no average revenue gap between keepers and cutters. That does not make Apple a 0.
What to do with the "myth" headline
Do not argue with Folsz and Grumbach about Fama-French residuals. Grant the narrow claim if their tables hold: over the window they studied, S&P 500 keepers were not, on average, crushed relative to cutters. Then ask the question the paper is not designed to answer. Would you rather buy from a 100 or a 45 when both "kept DEI"?
Use the database. Open the Apple profile. Open Costco. Open Walmart. That is three different scores for three companies the discourse treats as a binary. The binary is the con.
Go woke, go broke was never a promise that every S&P name with a Pride logo would file Chapter 11 on a Tuesday. It was a warning that politicizing the product shows up in trust, talent, and the checkout line — sometimes fast, sometimes as a grind. A paper that finds "indistinguishable" abnormal returns is not a permission slip to stop scoring the companies.
Our scorecard did not get the memo that DEI is over. Apple 100. Microsoft 100. JPMorgan 100. Costco 45. Walmart 90. Target 71. Shop accordingly.