This Pride season, much of the corporate world has gone pale. The rainbows have thinned. Logos have slipped off parade banners. Across large companies, the language of inclusion has been edited down – by one measure, mentions of diversity and inclusion have fallen by up to 98% in a little over two years, especially in the ‘land of the free’. Roughly four in ten companies have pulled back from Pride altogether, up from fewer than one in ten the year before. Much of this pressure originates across the Atlantic, but the caution it produces doesn’t stop at any border.
It’s disappointing and disturbing, but we can’t look away.
It is easy to understand the calculus. When the wind turns, the safest posture is to say less. But silence isn’t neutral. It is a position. And it is read, correctly, by the people it leaves exposed.
Not a season, a way of (work) life
This year, we are again supporting Pride, this time in Oulu, one of the northernmost Pride cities and the European Capital of Culture in 2026.
For Solita, supporting Pride isn’t a marketing window to be opened when the climate is favourable and closed when it is not. LGBTQIA+ rights are human rights: the right to be yourself, also at work, and to love who you choose without fear. Prejudice and discrimination remain among the most common human rights violations there are, and we stand against them in June and in every other month.
We want everyone at Solita to feel they can be themselves, with all their (im)perfections. This way of thinking sits at the centre of how we have run this company for nearly thirty years: caring for our community, our customers and our society, and staying courageous enough to say so plainly when it would be easier not to.
Words without actions are meaningless
Principles without practice are just performance. Concretely, we are continuing our work in the following ways:
We measure inclusion, not just declare it: We measure what we would otherwise be tempted to assume – tracking our people’s lived experience over time through eNPS and dedicated Inclusion surveys.
- We acknowledge bias and train our people to lead through it, from recruitment onward, to increase awareness and shift behaviour.
- We fund our employee resource groups, rather than just thank them.
- We audit for fairness: Annual salary surveys and renewed recruitment training to root out discrimination in pay and hiring.
- We stay vocal: Communicating the importance of inclusion internally and externally, even and especially when others go quiet.
- We hold the same baseline everywhere we operate: Human dignity isn’t a regional preference we adjust by market.
To anyone watching the colour drain out of this season and worried whether they still belong: you do. Here, and everywhere. Join us in celebrating Pride.