GUEST COLUMNIST
What corporate diversity looks like in 2016
I joined a bank after graduating from college in the 1970 sand was one of just three women ina class of 60 in the bank’s management training program. I worked hard and was promoted to the lending floor only to have my first customer tellme “noway am I going to ask a woman for money.”
I laughed and replied, “Well, that gives me some extratime today Iwas not counting on.” My dream at the bank was to be promoted to the bank’s national accounts department, but I was asked, “What would you do if you have to travel with a man? ”It seems funny now, but that is the way it was back then.
The most important thing to come from the last two decades is the consensus that diversity isa plus. Sound business judgment as well as asense of social responsibility may be responsible for this increasing awareness. The more that C-suites and boards can reflect consumers, the more companies can respond to consumers’ demands and preferences. Did youknow that according to a Catalyst Bottom Line Report, public companies that have a more diverse board perform better?
As recently as 1980, you could not find a single womanorminority CEO of a Standard and Poor’s 500 company.In 2015, there were 23 women CEOs of S&P 500 companies. While that is only 5 percent, the numbers a removing in the right direction. Disappointingly, there are only five African-American CEOs, eight CEO’s of Asian descent and only 1.6 percent of CEOs are of Latinos.
Boards of directors ofpublic companies are slowly becoming more diverse. In 2010 the majority of Fortune 500 companies had less than 30 percent women and minorities on their boards. These numbers are tiny compared to the larger picture, in which white males represent approximately 70 percent of total board seats.
Apositive sign of change is the increasing number of women and minorities obtaining professional degrees in medicine, engineering and law, and enrolling in MBA programs. However, if you arean African-American medical student, youare one of the .07 percent of African-Americans currently enrolled in medical school; not that much different than 10 years ago. Conversely, the number of woman law students is at parity with their male counterparts, quite the difference from my law school days when less than 20 percent of my class was female—which was not that long ago.
Change has come slowly to corporate boards, in part because being on aboard is a good gig. Turnover is much lower than in the C-suite, because corporations generally have board vacancies only when a member retires, or rarely, when share holders vote to replace board members who do not represent their interests or when CEOs accede to activist investor pressure for board representation.
Diversity is not simply havin gone woman on the board, or an AfricanAmerican executive officer of the company. It is more. Diversity not only represents sex and skin color, but age, ethnicity, gender orientation and many other tangible and intangible factors, all of which in form one’s perspective.