Corporate Diversity Programs Are Working, Straight White Men Say

(Bloomberg) -- Workplace diversity programs are addressing most of the obstacles that people of color, women and LGBTQ people face -- or so say straight white men, still the dominant group in corporate America. Their co-workers are less convinced, often by a wide margin, according to a Boston Consulting Group survey.

Among employees in under-represented demographic groups, three out of four said they hadn’t benefited from programs at their companies designed to help them, even though almost all companies had such initiatives, according to a survey that queried 16,500 people across industries earlier this year. The results are typically the same or worse within individual companies, said Matt Krentz, a managing director and senior partner at Boston Consulting Group who worked on the study.

“The easiest thing to do is to put pressure on your recruiting team and tell me to hire more diverse talent,” Krentz said. “Then you can say ‘look at the change I’m driving.’ The hard thing is what happens day-in and day-out and over time.”

Even as many corporate leaders pledge their commitments to more diversity in the workforce, gains for women and people of color have been modest. Among the biggest U.S. companies, men hold 95% of CEO titles, occupy about 80% of corporate board seats and have three quarters of management positions. Until this year, there were still some companies in the S&P 500 without any female directors.

The disconnect shows up clearly when straight white men are asked if they think under-represented groups still face obstacles to advancement at work. Women and non-white employees are twice as likely to agree they face obstacles in areas such as recruitment, retention and advancement, BCG found. The divide is even wider between straight men and LGBTQ employees, many of whom are not out at work.

The gap between what underrepresented employees say they experience and what their bosses think they do is probably one of the reasons the percentage of female managers has barely budged in the last decade. “All of these things add up over time, and unless you lean into it, we end up exactly where we started, despite the changes in how you hire,” Krentz said. “We’ve proven that over the last 30 years, over and over and over again.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jeff Green in Southfield, Michigan at jgreen16@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Janet Paskin at jpaskin@bloomberg.net, Rebecca Greenfield

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