In the wake of national movements calling for attention to equity, colleges, departments, and instructors are now faced with various responsibilities to implement practices and structures to support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). This project aims to design a professional development program for mathematics graduate teaching assistants (MGTAs) by helping them learn evidence-based teaching practices to support diverse groups of learners in engaging mathematics activities. Part of these efforts included investigating department leaders' understanding of equity. This paper focuses on interviews with department leaders at a large, public, research university. Our analysis shows that despite the implementation of university structures focused on improving equity, department leaders had very different understandings of equitable teaching, and reported differences in how equity factors into their roles. [Co-written with the ELITE PD Research Group. For the complete proceedings, see ED630210.]