It’s time for companies to move beyond mere tweets and hire more black employees at every level.
If the corporate bluster of the past week around diversity sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been hearing it for years.
Fortune 500 firms have used the protests since George Floyd was killed as an opportunity to boast about their commitments to diversity. Corporations have shared messages on social media condemning racism and announced their one-time donations to advocacy groups like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and Equal Justice Initiative. Those funds — totaling nearly half a billion — will certainly help, but they also conveniently transfer responsibility for tackling the challenge of racial inequality away from some of the world’s most powerful companies. Virtually absent from the myriad Black Lives Matter pledges are firm industrywide assurances to bolster the hiring of black employees at the corporate or board levels, let alone among the rank and file.
For years, corporations have made vague promises about improving inclusivity and hiring more black workers. But the ranks of black employees in the boardroom and c-suite remain unacceptably low.
In the boardroom, just 4.1 percent of directors were black as of last June, merely half a percentage point above the 2008 level, according to an Institutional Shareholder Services analysis of the Russell 3000. Black employees represented just 3 percent of chief executive and 1 percent of chief financial officer positions, according to a Stanford business school study titled “Diversity in the C-Suite:The Dismal State of Diversity Among Fortune 100 Companies.” One in four companies in the group still have an all-white executive suite, the study found.
In many places, like Wall Street, diversity figures are a closely guarded secret, so it’s helpful to look at tech firms, some of which provide publicly available annual diversity reports. However, despite opening themselves up to that scrutiny, the mix of workers at companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple and Amazon has remained stubbornly consistent.
Since 2014, when many of the largest technology firms began disclosing diversity data, black representation in technical roles rose by only about 1 percentage point at Microsoft, Google, Apple and Facebook. Facebook trails with just a 1.5 percent black tech force, compared with Apple at 6 percent.
