Cornell HR in Hospitality 2026: What Employers Can Still Do About DEI and Affirmative Action

The big takeaway from a timely legal session: women’s networks, mentorship programs, and belonging work don’t need to disappear. They need to be reframed, opened up, and built to last.

More than 350 hospitality HR leaders, employment lawyers, and academics gathered at The Diplomat Beach Resort in Hollywood, Florida last week for the 20th annual Cornell HR in Hospitality Conference, and the mood was equal parts energized and uneasy.

Across two packed days of HR and law tracks, one question kept surfacing in sessions, hallways, and coffee-line conversations: what are employers actually allowed to do anymore?

Federal pushback on affirmative action and DEI. Ongoing labor challenges. A regulatory environment that seems to shift week to week. Even with plenty of talk about AI and automation across the agenda, the through-line was unmistakable: hospitality is, and always will be, a people-first business. Which makes the choices HR leaders make right now matter more than ever.

Full disclosure: I had the honor of delivering the closing keynote, The State of Women in Hospitality Leadership 2026: What's Holding Women Back and How HR Can Help, so I had a front-row seat to the conversations all week.

Because DEI is very much hertelier's jam, one session felt especially urgent: Affirmative Action & DEI: What MUST You Do, What CAN You Do?

The most reassuring takeaway? According to the panel, the answer is not to panic-delete every women’s network, heritage celebration, mentorship program, or belonging initiative. The smarter move is to review them carefully, open them up where needed, and make them resilient enough to survive whatever comes next.

If that sounds like a lifeline for your DEI work, keep reading.

Meet the Panel

The session was led by three veteran employment attorneys who clearly know their stuff and were not afraid to be candid about it.

Celeste Yeager, shareholder at Littler Mendelson in Dallas, brought a national client perspective and led much of the conversation. Dana Kravetz, managing partner at Michelman & Robinson, specializes in representing hotels and grounded the discussion in our industry's realities. And Ken Rosenberg, partner at Fox Rothschild, runs the firm's national affirmative action practice and has written more than 1,000 affirmative action plans over his career.

Side note that was one of my favorite moments of the session: Dana, who is a man (see photo), shared what it is like having a name many assume belongs to a woman. He talked about feeling the aggressive tone in emails from male attorneys who assumed Dana was a woman, then watching the energy shift the moment they got him on the phone.

It was a small, funny anecdote that landed a much bigger point. The dynamics women navigate every day at work are real, and sometimes it takes someone outside the experience to confirm what those of us inside it already know.

Affirmative Action: What Survived, What Didn't

Ken laid out the legal landscape clearly.

In January 2025, President Trump rescinded Executive Order 11246, the Johnson-era directive that had required federal contractors to maintain affirmative action plans based on race, ethnicity, and gender for nearly 60 years. For hospitality, this matters because many hotels and restaurants that host federal conferences or serve federal agencies may meet the threshold to be considered federal contractors: 50 or more employees and a contract of $50,000 or more.

What the president could not do without Congress is repeal two underlying statutes: Section 503 of the Rehabilitation Act, which covers individuals with disabilities, and VEVRAA, which covers protected veterans. So covered federal contractors still must prepare two affirmative action plans, one for disabled persons and one for veterans, though the requirements are substantially lighter than before.

The OFCCP, the agency that historically enforced these rules, has also been dramatically weakened. Ken noted that staffing has reportedly been cut by roughly 82%, the website is essentially gone, and existing audits have been suspended or closed without further investigation. Looking ahead, he said the proposed federal budget would eliminate the OFCCP entirely and replace it with a new Office of Civil Rights.

In other words: the old affirmative action regime has changed significantly. But the compliance story is not over.

The Self-Identification Form Question

A question that came up several times: should employers still be collecting voluntary race and gender data from applicants?

Ken's advice was direct. If you do not have a statutory or regulatory requirement to collect that information, you probably should not be collecting it, because a prospective plaintiff could argue you gathered the data specifically to discriminate. Disability and veteran self-identification still need to be collected if you are a covered federal contractor.

But, and this is important for multi-state hospitality operators, Celeste pointed out that certain states and municipalities still require affirmative action plans and the data that supports them, including Minnesota, Minneapolis, and Duluth for state contractors. California's pay reporting requirements still demand gender and race data on every employee. For employees, as opposed to applicants, EEO-1 reporting is still legally required, even if submission deadlines have been in flux.

The takeaway? This is not a one-size-fits-all moment. Before you delete forms, stop collecting data, or overhaul your process, talk to counsel and know which federal, state, and local rules apply to your business.

The Smart Workaround: Look Under the Hood, Privately

One of the most practical pieces of advice from the panel was that many sophisticated employers are still analyzing their hiring, promotion, and compensation data, but doing it under attorney-client privilege rather than producing formal affirmative action plans that sit on a server somewhere.

As Dana put it, the philosophy is:

"It's okay to look under the hood, and don't be scared of what you're going to find, because if you don't do it, the plaintiff's firm will."

Employers can still, with legal guidance, identify barriers, look for pay inequities, and understand whether their hiring reflects the qualified available workforce. What they should avoid, the panel cautioned, is publishing goals or under-utilization findings, or creating documents that essentially say, "we are underutilized in women in our accounting department."

Celeste reframed what affirmative action analysis is actually meant to do, and this distinction is one I think gets lost in the public conversation.

It was never about choosing someone because they are a woman or a minority. It is about evaluating whether your hiring practices reflect the qualified, available workforce, and if not, asking why.

Are jobs only being posted internally? Are roles only open for one day before being filled? Are the same informal networks producing the same candidates again and again?

Those questions have nothing to do with race or gender, and everything to do with opening the gate.

The DEI Reframe, Not the Unraveling

Here is where the conversation got most useful for hospitality leaders.

The panel was unanimous: the answer is not to dismantle DEI work. It is to reframe it.

Dana, who works extensively with hotels, observed something most people in our industry recognize. At the frontline level, hotel workforces often beautifully reflect the diverse communities they operate in. But as you move up the ranks, that diversity too often disappears.

That is the gap DEI work was always meant to address. And the work of addressing it has not gone away just because the language has become more politically charged.

So what should hospitality HR leaders actually change? The panel offered a few practical guardrails:

• Open up affinity groups. Celeste has seen most employers move to making affinity groups open to everyone, with allies welcome. Anyone can join Pride. Anyone can join the Women's Network. You learn more about a culture by participating with people from it, and openness reduces legal exposure dramatically.

  
  

• Be careful with mandatory DEI training. Ken warned that if training communicates anything that could be perceived as exclusionary toward non-minority or non-female employees, with implicit bias training framed around concepts like "white male privilege" being a frequent flashpoint, the message itself could be deemed harassing under the Trump administration's guidance and potentially trigger a reverse discrimination claim.
  

• Ditch the metrics. Dana noted that a hotel client he worked with in 2021 had publicly committed to a 25% increase in management diversity. That kind of percentage-based public commitment is largely gone now. The reframe is language like "an inclusive talent pipeline" or "a culture of belonging." Same goal, no quota.
  

• Celebrate, don't exclude. As Ken put it, employers can absolutely still celebrate cultural differences, holidays, and heritage events. Just bring everyone in under the umbrella, rather than excluding anyone.

  
  

The Coca-Cola Case: A Cautionary Tale

The panel spent meaningful time on EEOC v. Coca-Cola Beverages Northeast, filed in February 2026 by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In short, the EEOC sued the company over a two-day women-only networking and development retreat held in September 2024, where female employees were paid their normal wages, excused from regular work duties, and brought together for team-building, executive panels, and career development. The agency alleges this constituted sex discrimination against male employees.

The House Democratic Women's Caucus has called the lawsuit a "political stunt" and asked EEOC Chair Andrea Lucas to drop it. The case is still pending, and the allegations have not yet been proven. But whether or not the case succeeds, Celeste's takeaway for HR leaders was clear.

When designing retreats, networking events, or affinity gatherings, ask whether the barrier to entry is based on a protected characteristic, or on something objective like sales performance, role, tenure, or achievement.

And as Dana suggested, employers can often achieve the same goal with a panel format that includes men in the room as part of the conversation, rather than holding events that exclude them.

For women's leadership work, that is an important distinction. The mission can stay. The structure may need to evolve.

What This Means for Hospitality HR

Three takeaways stuck with me from the session.

1. The legal climate is genuinely complex, and likely to keep shifting. There could be a whole new federal civil rights agency in the near future, and a new administration could swing the pendulum back again. Building programs that can flex with the political weather is more useful than building programs that depend on it.
   

2. Equality work itself has not become illegal. What has changed is how employers talk about it, document it, and structure participation. Making sure qualified candidates have a real shot, surfacing pay inequities, and building cultures where people from all backgrounds can rise remains legal, valuable, and necessary.
   

3. Most of what companies have already built does not need to be torn down. It needs to be reframed, opened up, and made resilient enough to survive whatever comes next. For me, this was the most reassuring point of the session.

For an industry built on hospitality, on welcoming everyone in, that reframe should feel pretty natural.