From Bloomberg:
Corporate America Promised to Hire a Lot More People of Color.
It Actually Did.The year after Black Lives Matter protests, the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs—94% went to people of color.
Published: September 25, 2023
Updated: September 26, 2023 at 8:00 AM PDTFor a brief moment in 2020, much of corporate America united around a common goal: to address the stark racial imbalances in their workplaces.
Mass protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd led to a flurry of company promises, both specific and vague, to hire and promote more Black people and others from underrepresented groups.
Exclusive analysis by Bloomberg News shows how many of the biggest public companies did.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires companies with 100 or more employees to report their workforce demographics every year. Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms.
In total, they increased their US workforces by 323,094 people in 2021, the first year after the Black Lives Matter protests—and the most recent year for which this data exists.
The overall job growth included 20,524 White workers. The other 302,570 jobs—or 94% of the headcount increase—went to people of color.
My guess is that another reason this is so crazily disproportionate besides the Racial Reckoning is that a lot of Baby Boomers in 2021 looked at their 401ks and refinanced their mortgages at a low rate and said, Hey, I can afford to retire.
But, still …
Was there below average immigration in 2021, or was that only 2020?
People of color make up a minority of the US population, and in most cases are underrepresented at big US companies. In 2021, Hispanic, Asian and Black people made up a vast majority of the added workers—a trend that, analysts say, is necessary to overcome their historic underrepresentation.
The biggest shifts happened in less-senior job categories. White people held fewer of those roles in 2021 than they did in 2020, whereas thousands of people of color were added to the ranks.
But the trend continued up the job ladder in top, high-paid jobs, too: Companies increased their racial diversity among executives, managers and professionals.
White people still hold a disproportionate share of the top, highly paid jobs in the US at S&P 100 companies. But the share of executive, managerial and professional roles held by people of color increased by about 2 percentage points compared with 2020—more than double the average annual gains at big and mid-sized US companies in previous years.
The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission requires companies with 100 or more employees to report their workforce demographics every year. Bloomberg obtained 2020 and 2021 data for 88 S&P 100 companies and calculated overall US job growth at those firms.
In total, they increased their US workforces by 323,094 people in 2021, the first year after the Black Lives Matter protests—and the most recent year for which this data exists.
The group of companies in our data set employs more than 9 million people in the US at some of the country’s largest and most lucrative firms, in industries from tech to finance, including Apple Inc., Walmart Inc. and Wells Fargo & Co.
“Those are astounding percentages,” said David Larcker, the director of the Corporate Governance Research Initiative at Stanford University.
The reasons for the changes are complex and may be unique to a specific moment in time. In 2021, companies were hiring lots of people while prioritizing diversity. Many have since cut jobs amid an economic slowdown just as a backlash to corporate diversity efforts grows.
While the biggest shifts in 2021 happened in lower-paying job categories, such as sales workers and admins, the trend also occurred in well-paid and powerful managerial and professional roles. Even at the executive level, more than half the added jobs went to workers of color.
Black workers, who were the initial focus of the diversity push, made some particularly notable gains. Their share of managers and professionals increased at 70 companies in our data set, and they boosted their ranks among executives in nearly as many firms.
For years, companies have blamed the lack of a sufficient recruiting pipeline for why their workplaces don’t reflect the country’s racial and ethnic makeup. White men tend to disproportionately hold the highest-paying roles, and hiring managers have long said that qualified candidates from other backgrounds for elite jobs were few and far between. The latest findings show that when under pressure to hire and promote qualified diverse talent, organizations find a way to do it.
But even such big one-time gains—and losses—represent a relatively small slice of the full picture. The share of executive, managerial and professional roles held by people of color increased by about 2 percentage points compared with 2020. That still leaves most companies in our dataset lopsided, with White people holding a disproportionate share of high-paying jobs at S&P 100 companies. …
At companies where overall employment shrank in 2021, White workers made up 68.5% of the losses, another 16.5% were Black, 9.7% were Hispanic and 2.3% were Asian.
The corporate reckoning on institutionalized racism in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s murder by a White police officer was a factor, too.
“The work was exploding and organizations were just trying to figure out what to do in that very moment,” said Stephanie LaJoie-Lubin, who worked in the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging department at CarGurus, a car online review website, at the time and consulted others on the side.
That summer, some companies rebranded products that had long been marketed with racist stereotypes. More pledged hundreds of millions of dollars—and their shelf space — to racial equity efforts. Separately, about half the firms in the S&P 100, including Amazon.com Inc., PepsiCo Inc., Meta Platforms Inc. (then Facebook) and Microsoft Corp., set ambitious targets for increasing their share of people of color in leadership. Amazon set out to double Black vice presidents and directors; Microsoft pledged to double Black managers and senior leaders in the US by 2025.
Among those that didn’t make specific promises, there were public acknowledgements that they needed to do better. Walmart’s CEO said the retailer was “not as diverse as we want to be and aspire to be,” while Nike Inc. and Lowe’s Cos. were among many companies that joined OneTen, a group that aims to get 1 million Black employees middle-class jobs within a decade.
While many of the specific goals were for several years in the future, Bloomberg’s analysis shows progress. Meta, Microsoft, Pepsi and Lowe’s were among 39 firms that increased the number of Black workers across all the top, high-paying job categories: professionals, managers and executives.
Digging into individual companies, different trends emerge: not all boosted diversity at the same rate or in the same ways across job categories.
Nike is one of the more clear-cut examples of the overall trend. Black, Hispanic and Asian people were added at almost every rank up and down the pipeline at the Beaverton, Oregon-based retailer. At the same time, the company lost White workers across the board.
