As a part of the recent 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, Disney shareholders voted overwhelmingly against a proposal to stop participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index.
Shareholders Vote Against Corporate Equality Index Proposal
The 2025 Annual Meeting of Shareholders, which can be watched in full on The Walt Disney Company website, allowed shareholders to cast their votes on several new proposals. Some of the proposals were regular reoccurrences for the shareholder meeting, such as electing the directors for the company. During the 2025 meeting, all current directors sought reelection and were approved with a 96% proxy vote.
Following the named proposals, the meeting also included a section for Shareholder Proposals. One of the three Shareholder Proposals asked for a vote to cease participating in the Human Rights Campaign’s (HRC) Corporate Equality Index.
The Corporate Equality Index (CEI) is described as a “national benchmarking tool on corporate policies, practices, and benefits pertinent to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer employees” on the HRC official website. The website includes a search tool where individuals can search for the name of a company and see its ranking on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being a top inclusivity score.
The Walt Disney Company most recently scored a perfect 100 on the index in 2025, which included scores of 50/50 for Inclusive Benefits and 20/20 for Corporate Social Responsibility, among other metrics.
The now-rejected proposal requested for The Walt Disney Company to no longer participate in the CEI. In supporting statement found in the 2025 Proxy Statement, shareholders said:
From 2007 to present, Disney received a perfect score on the Human Rights Campaign (HRC)’s annual Corporate Equality Index (CEI), which can only be attained by abiding by its partisan, divisive, and increasingly radical criteria.
Additional supporting statements call the CEI a “a social credit score for corporations” that is used by the HRC to “force them to do the political bidding of HRC and others.” The statement claims Disney’s divisive agenda was the main cause of the company’s stock falling to some of the lowest prices in a decade, and that continued participation in the CEI is hurting shareholders’ interests.
The 2025 Proxy Statement included a board recommendation to vote against the proposal, listing three main reasons for the decision:
The Company provides transparency on a wide range of matters important to shareholders, including through participation in external
surveys.The Board and its committees oversee the Company’s workforce equity matters, environmental, social and governance reporting, and human
rights policies.We do not believe the request would provide additional value to shareholders
The proposal was ultimately rejected, as only 1% of shareholders voted in support of the company’s removal from the index. 99% sided with the board and rejected the proposal.
In other news from the Annual Shareholders Meeting, CEO Bob Iger teased a possible Disney+ series starring Figment, announced the development of Coco 2 by Pixar, and revealed a new scale model of the “Lion King” Pride Lands coming to Disneyland Paris.
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