Archive for the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Category

Ashley Banjo: Diversity’s Bafta shows ‘what the country truly thinks’ – Metro.co.uk

Ashley described the Bafta win as meaning everything to him (Picture: PA/BBC)

Diversity dance star Ashley Banjo has reflected on the groups 2021 Bafta win for Virgin TVs must see-moment for their powerful Black Lives Matter inspired routine, seeing it as what the country really thinks.

The dance, which was performed on Britains Got Talents first semi-final of the series in September 2020, was a reflection on topical issues of the past year, including the coronavirus pandemic and the death of George Floyd.

The homecoming for BGTs 2009 winning act sparked 31,000 Ofcom complaints and saw 32-year-old Ashley subjected to racist comments online at the rate of 100 abusive tweets per minute.

However despite acknowledging the polar opposites in reaction, the choreographer and dancer has chosen to believe the Bafta win is the publics true response to the emotive routine.

Describing how the win meant everything, Ashley explained: To go from being the most complained about group of people in the country to winning a Bafta for the must-see moment as voted for by the public its like polar opposite ends of the scale.

The star, who was chatting on The One Show on Monday, commented further on the division in public reaction to the performance.

To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a webbrowser thatsupports HTML5video

Even though its the same Great British public, it represents a completely different group of people to me, he revealed.

All of the hate [of] minority. That Bafta represents, in my view, what the country really thinks, so Im forever grateful for everyone that voted.

For anyone wondering where he keeps his award, the new host of ITV gameshow The Void reassured presenters Jermaine Jenas and Emma Willis that it has pride of place on his mantelpiece.

Ashley has also very recently revealed that he is in talks with Hollywood producers about a possible Diversity action-inspired blockbuster, which he described as feeling like Mission: Impossible or Fast and Furious, but with dance stunts and genuine creativity at the heart of it.

Speaking to The Sunday Mirror, he teased that the bosses hed been speaking to were very experienced in action movies and they know dance.

Considering the current record-breaking box office performance of Fast and Furious 9, we reckon Ashleys on to a good thing.

The One Show airs weeknights at 7pm on BBC One.

Got a story?

If youve got a celebrity story, video or pictures get in touch with the Metro.co.uk entertainment team by emailing us celebtips@metro.co.uk, calling 020 3615 2145 or by visiting our Submit Stuff page wed love to hear from you.

MORE : Bafta TV Awards 2021: Ashley Banjo thanks those who complained over Diversity BGT performance amid win: You showed why this moment was necessary

MORE : Ashley Banjo not surprised by Prince Harry and Meghan Markles Oprah Winfrey interview

Excerpt from:
Ashley Banjo: Diversity's Bafta shows 'what the country truly thinks' - Metro.co.uk

This organization was supposed to unite Jews. A debate over …

(JTA) The organization that pioneered the Jewish civil rights alliance with Black Americans may lose its independence in part, insiders say, because of its support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the grassroots-driven community relations network, is in talks about its future with the Jewish Federations of North America, the umbrella body for the federations network.

Neither the JCPA nor Jewish Federations would comment for this story, but some insiders say the likely outcome is the incorporation of the JCPA into the federations umbrella. Such a move would end JCPAs 75-year history of consensus-driven civil rights advocacy and leave standing a single voice that is deeply beholden to wealthy donors to speak on behalf of Jews on national issues.

Other insiders say the talks are still open-ended and theres no clear outcome in sight. They emphasize that the talks are an exploration and not a negotiation.

They are being led by Eric Fingerhut, the Jewish Federations CEO, and David Bohm, JCPAs lay chairman. Its not clear if there is any deadline for a resolution.

Conditions in U.S. politics and the funding and leadership situations of the two groups make a potential merger seem practical on many levels. But the possibility of one has startled some stalwarts of the JCPA, who see it as one of the few remaining places in the Jewish community where unity is cultivated. They also fear its disappearance would bring to an end the leading role that Jewish communities have played in shaping post-World War II America.

The JCPA represents the most democratic with a small d method of coming to policy decisions as a community, said Hannah Rosenthal, who for years was its executive director and subsequently served as president and CEO at one of its constituents, the Milwaukee federation.

By contrast, the federation system, which raises money for Israel and local Jewish activities, is guided more by donors than by the grassroots, Rosenthal said. Wary of alienating big givers, a combined organization would likely be less inclined than the JCPA to tackle the sometimes controversial issues of racial justice, climate change and stem cell research, she said.

Im not telling a secret here, but larger donors have more say over a local community in the federation system than the smaller donor, Rosenthal said.

The Jewish Telegraphic Agency interviewed more than a dozen people for this story, including the directors of local Jewish community relations councils, the backbone of the JCPA network, and former JCPA staffers. Many declined to speak on the record because of the sensitivity of the topic.

Some of the insiders say the trigger for the JFNAs effort to effectively take over the JCPA came in August, when the JCPA signed an open letter in The New York Times declaring Black Lives Matter along with some 600 Jewish organizations. Others say the talks already were underway.

The ad infuriated some federation officials, who thought it was reckless to endorse a movement despised by Republicans and has been accused of anti-Israel politics.

These officials also worried that the ad threw into question JFNAs hallmark: nonpartisanship. Even though the JCPA and Jewish Federations are separate national groups, local federations and Jewish community relations councils have a symbiotic relationship: Virtually every local federation funds its JCRC to a degree, and all but a dozen JCRCs are fully incorporated into their federation. That leaves the federations fundraising vulnerable to disgruntled donors if a community relations council adopts a divisive opinion.

Traditionally the model was meant to achieve the exact opposite and keep fundraising separate from government and community relations, said Shaul Kelner, a Vanderbilt University professor who studies the contemporary American Jewish community. But that model has grown difficult to sustain, he said.

As the country has become more polarized, so has the Jewish community. That has made the JCPAs job much harder, Kelner said.

During the polarizing debate over the Iran nuclear deal in 2015, for example, federations and their JCRCs agonized over whether to support or reject the deal.

Those close to the JCPA say the community needs a national organization adept at forging alliances with other groups and providing a Jewish voice in shaping civil society. Ron Halber, executive director of the JCRC of Greater Washington, said the federations, which are more susceptible to donor pressures, are necessarily less agile.

An independent JCPA will shield federations from some of the very, very difficult political issues, and divisive issues, Halber said.

The JCPA was founded as the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council in 1944 by groups eager for the community to speak in a single voice about what would become known as the Holocaust. In the late 1940s, the group led advocacy to end discriminatory immigration policies. By 1950 its focus was civil rights, and it joined with the NAACP to found the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, which helped spearhead desegregation and voting rights activism. (The organization changed its name in 1997.)

The umbrella body was a major force through the 1980s, crafting consensus policies on immigration, civil rights, pro-Israel advocacy in the wake of the 1967 Six-Day War, and through the 70s and 80s on Soviet Jewry.

Its process to make formal statements is arduous, involving months of debate and buy-in from national agencies and constituent JCRCs, which currently number 125. It culminates in a lengthy voting process at the annual JCPA conference. The process is meant to assure credible consensus on issues like Israel, civil rights, hate crimes and, more recently, climate change and stem cell research.

It was even useful when there was no consensus to be had: In 2015, JCPA released a noncommittal statement on the Iran nuclear deal. (Polls showed the majority of the American Jewish community supporting the agreement, but also a significant portion against.)

That process, however, is increasingly out of step with Americas polarized politics, which are reflected in a Jewish community divided between a largely liberal majority and a highly vocal and increasingly activist conservative minority.

Donors more often prefer to give to ideologically driven groups, making JCPAs emphasis on consensus-building less attractive, insiders say. JCPAs financial disclosures show a decline in donations from nearly $4 million in 2015 to $2.4 million in 2019, the latest year for which data are available.

JCPAs struggles have not just been financial. It also lost at least one member: The American Jewish Committee last year quietly removed itself from the JCPAs national roster, which now includes 16 groups. An AJC spokesman did not return a request for comment.

And more recently, the JCPA has been without a CEO: The most recent person to hold the job, David Bernstein, left at the beginning of this year and now leads the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, which of late has been warning about the dangers of Critical Race Theory, an educational framework that claims that racism is embedded in legal systems and policies.

Jewish Federations, by comparison, has a stable budget and is a financial behemoth that brought in $270 million in 2019, according to tax records. Some $212 million of that money went out in grants to local federations and other Jewish initiatives. It also has a relatively new CEO in Fingerhut, who joined the organization two years ago bringing with him, insiders say, a conservative approach to public relations. They point to his years as CEO of Hillel International, where he cracked down on controversial messaging, particularly on Israel. That included inhibiting cooperation on campuses between Hillel and J Street U, the liberal Mideast policy group that is often critical of the Israeli government.

A number of directors of independent JCRCs said they were watching the talks with interest, but many noted that the national JCPA had not influenced their agendas for years.

National organizations find it increasingly difficult to find common ground, evidenced in the infighting and dissension that have divided the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

One-size-fits-all no longer serves Jewish communities, said Jeremy Burton, the Boston JCRC director.

The issues and relationships and partnerships, and where to land on those issues in our increasingly fractured partisan, national conversation, is different for Boston than it is for Houston, he said. JCRC officials in St. Louis, San Francisco and Minnesota had similar takes.

The JCPAs added value, said Steve Gutow, who directed the JCPA from 2005 to 2015, is in giving voice to the Jewish street the JCRC constituents that include synagogues, Jewish fraternal societies, grassroots activists and veteran groups that engage in broader community activism.

This was begun in the 40s, this idea that there would be some good to having certain issues looked at by a group of people that were tied to the federation in one way or another, but also were probably more involved with whats going on in the streets of the Jewish community in levels that arent just about giving, he said.

The polarization of the American polity coupled with the financial crisis of 2008 made Jewish community relations a harder sell for fundraisers, insiders said. It made more sense for donors to give to a Jewish group, on the left or the right, that was wholly dedicated to their politics rather than a body like a JCRC or a JCPA that would necessarily embrace policies that they might not prioritize or even oppose. The process accelerated JCRCs being absorbed into local federations.

The civil rights protests that erupted after a police officer murdered George Floyd, an African-American, in Minneapolis in May 2020 exposed these divisions in the Jewish community.

Bend the Arc, a liberal Jewish social justice group, spearheaded the Aug. 28 ad supporting the Black Lives Matter movement. Its language was unequivocal: The Black Lives Matter movement is the current day Civil Rights movement in this country, and it is our best chance at equity and justice. By supporting this movement, we can build a country that fulfills the promise of freedom, unity, and safety for all of us, no exceptions.

The national Jewish establishment, however, was wary of the movement ever since the Movement for Black Lives, an activist group that represents some but not all groups under the BLM umbrella, called Israel an apartheid state and accused it of genocide. Since then, a number of BLM movement leaders have been harshly critical of Israel, drawing parallels between the Palestinian struggle and their own.

Jewish groups who engage with Black Lives Matter note that the movement is decentralized, and that individual members and chapters do not necessarily endorse or even care about criticism of Israel. They see the movement as having evolved into a set of ideals related to racial justice rather than a specific agenda.

In its end-of-year report for 2020, JCPA boasted that it was standing with the Black community to advocate for ending structural racism in the U.S. At the same time, it acknowledged that there had been questions and concerns about antisemitism within the Black Lives Matter movement, and said it had produced webinars and resources addressing those complaints.

An insider faulted the JCPA for a recent set of resolutions embracing voting rights reforms that are endorsed only by Democrats, as opposed to advocacy for a less objectionable course of action like joining nonpartisan get-out-the-vote drives. But voting rights activists, alarmed by a battery of new laws advanced by Republicans at the state level that would restrict access, see little use for ostensible neutrality.

Fingerhut, representing the federation movement in the discussions with JCPA, is said to be leveraging the fact that the vast majority of constituent JCRCs are wholly federation-run, as well as his influence over the donors. Fingerhuts critics say he has a tendency to crowd out dissent. His defenders say his leadership style comes with a track record of getting things done.

At Hillel, Fingerhut doubled funding and set clear parameters on Israel policy. And as JFNAs head during the pandemic, Fingerhut helped wrangle from Congress and the Trump administration massive relief for nonprofits. Fingerhut, who in the 1990s served a term representing Ohio as a moderate Democrat in Congress, is a stickler for nonpartisanship.

The JCPA still endeavors to find common ground. Its most recent resolutions included an urging to advocate for the Muslim Uyghurs under siege in China and to advance the recent normalization agreements between Israel and its Arab neighbors.

Halber said the JCPA is a platform for networking. Some of the Washington JCRCs best recent initiatives, he said, had come out of talking with other JCRCs. A peer-to-peer program that sends Jewish students to public and private schools to talk about their lives as Jewish teens was modeled in St. Louis. Another that reviews public school curricula on Israel, Judaism and the Holocaust was modeled in San Francisco.

That kind of schmoozing would continue at least informally, but it wouldnt be the same as a forum where they can exchange ideas, Halber said, particularly in a time of crisis.

With polarization, with the Jewish community in a society where there is the undermining of democratic norms, with the need to bring people together, with the need for Israel advocacy, more than ever with the need for intergroup relations with the rise of antisemitism, this should be the golden age of the JCRC movement, he said.

Rosenthal, the former JCPA executive director, said the best protection against antisemitism are the alliances forged through the responsive community relations that federations are less able to handle. She recalled as director of the Milwaukee federation convening an interfaith event at a synagogue after the 2018 massacre of 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh.

We called upon the faith leaders of other faiths to come up on the bimah, and they came and they kept coming and they kept coming, she said. And I started crying, and Im the child of a [Holocaust] survivor, and Im looking at all these people who came up to say we stand in solidarity with you, we have your back. And that could not have happened without a robust community relations strategy.

Steve Windmueller, a professor of Jewish communal studies at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion who has directed the federation in Albany, New York, and the JCRC in Los Angeles, said past crises, including the Six-Day War and the civil rights movement, were moments where a single Jewish voice proved effective. Such moments will continue in the future, he said.

The community has to figure out how to effectively message what our interests are, especially at a time when we see so much antisemitism and the isolation of the Jewish community from the larger public, Windmueller said.

Follow this link:
This organization was supposed to unite Jews. A debate over ...

After sporting Black Lives Matter sticker on his bag last year, Kirk Triplett takes more action on social justice issues – usatoday.com

Last August, Kirk Triplett put a Black Lives Matter sticker on his bag for the Bridgestone Senior Players Championship.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Triplett was prompted to show support for the cause of racial injustice because of his son Kobe, who is African- American.

I was thinking about my son, who is 18 years old and could be driving a car in the wrong situation, Triplett said Friday after the second round of the $3 million PGA TourChampions major. I wanted to make sure thats not his responsibility to deescalate the situation.

But Triplett knew displaying the sticker was not really taking action. An interview at Firestone Country Club and some that followed helped him discover a way to accelerate change.

One of his comments I actually Googled what can a white guy do? he said caught the attention of Hall of Fame safety Donnie Shell, who emailed Triplett and told him he had an answer to his question. The former Pittsburgh Steeler is a board member of Dedication To Community (D2C), a national non-profit that educates and empowers communities on diversity, belonging, and equity. Tripletts partnership with the organization was announced in February.

Putting a Black Lives Matter sticker on your bag is just kinda, Thats a problem. But you hope people migrate from that to solutions and thats the reason for Dedication To Community on my bag, Triplett said. Their main focus is law enforcement training. Its guys that came through the NFL, worked heavily with them on their conduct policy, and the founder is [M.] Quentin Williams, he was an FBI agent and a prosecutor.

These guys have one solution. Training law enforcement, training the communities, helping people understand each other better. Really what they work on is communication and not letting these situations escalate.

Triplett, who lives in Scottsdale, Arizona, and his wife Cathi have four children twins Conor and Sam, 25, daughter Alexis, 21, and Kobe, the latter two adopted. Alexis is Latino; Kobes biological father is Black, his mother Japanese.

Before Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder in the May 25, 2020, killing of Floyd, Triplett said he had several conversations with Kobe. Chauvin received a sentence of 22.5 years on Friday.

Weve discussed that fairly regularly, Triplett said of the Chauvin case. This is not a great deal of interest to him. It became a great deal of interest to me when I talked to him and said, If you get stopped by the police, you need to do this, this and this. Ive got three other kids and that conversation looked completely different with them than it did with him. I thought, Heres where the patent unfairness comes in.

When people say systemic racism or system inequality its something thats really hard for me to visualize and understand because Ive never faced it. When Im having that conversation with him, I just get the little, tiniest inkling of what this might be like. I think thats the first step, everybody understanding what sometimes these people face.

Triplett said Kobe got the message. The Tripletts also participated in relationship training through D2C.

D2C has a partnership with the Miami Heat, training Miami patrol officers the Heat sponsor, and is involved with otherprofessional sports.

They have an agreement with Joe Gibbs Racing and they train the organization there. They do some stuff with the NHL, Triplett said. The NHL is like golf, theres not a lot of racial issues in those sports because theyre so white, for lack of a better term, theres not a lot of diversity.

Most sports today that lack diversity want to create opportunity. Its not an overnight process, but some of it starts with funding and finding ways for young people to look at a sport and instead of saying, Oh, thats the white mans game, they think, Heres this APGA, [a non-profit tour to prepare African-American and minority golfers] or I can go to school at a HBCU. Theres a pathway to participate in the sport.

Triplett sees progress in that regard.

Phil Mickelson made a large donation to HBCU golf teams, he said. The PGA Tour is trying to help minority access to golf through the APGA. Billy Horschel has also sponsored a tournament for the APGA. Access to health care, access to economic opportunity, all of these things.

Golf does a great job of contributing to the community. Maybe we havent always done a great job in the social justice area. I dont see any reason we cant.

Follow this link:
After sporting Black Lives Matter sticker on his bag last year, Kirk Triplett takes more action on social justice issues - usatoday.com

Op-Ed: U.S. businesses pledged to support BLM. How have they done? – Los Angeles Times

Last summer, when Black Lives Matter protests rolled through nearly 550 towns and cities across the U.S., the business community reacted swiftly.

Two weeks after the senseless killing of George Floyd, American corporations pledged more than $1.7 billion to address racism and injustice. At the same time, company leaders publicly promised to make their organizations more diverse by improving anti-discriminatory hiring practices, pay parity and equitable access to advancement for people of color.

Business has the transformative power to change and contribute to a more open, diverse and inclusive society. We can only accomplish this by starting from within our organizations, wrote Vijay Eswaran, executive chairman of the multinational conglomerate QI Group.

One year later, it seems appropriate to ask what has become of this outpouring of good will. How many Black people have been hired or promoted? How many are at pay equity with their white peers? What are the results of the systems put in place to promote Black employees retention and career advancement?

History makes it clear how crucial accountability is for social justice. Although diversity and inclusion initiatives trace back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the chasm that separate promises and even good faith efforts from results remains stubbornly wide.

A February 2021 McKinsey report on race in the workplace describes Black employees as being 41% less likely to believe promotions are fair and 39% less likely to believe their companys diversity, equity and inclusion programs are effective than white employees in the same company. Racial discrimination suits, among the most-filed complaints at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, result in relief only 15% of the time.

And of course, corporate support of social justice initiatives is not altogether altruistic. By speaking up for Black Lives Matter, companies position themselves to reap capitalistic benefits and avoid cancellation. According to a June 2020 survey, a majority of Americans of all generations 60% of the U.S. population say that how a brand responds to racial justice protests will influence whether they buy or boycott the brand in the future.

Nonetheless and not surprisingly its not hard to find examples of companies publicly voicing solidarity with Black workers but not backing it up in their hiring practices and policies.

A study published in May looked at diversity in the technology industry and found that companies that made statements of support with Black Lives Matter had 20% fewer Black employees on average than those that didnt.

As the protests were peaking in 2020, Amazon announced a $10-million donation to organizations supporting the fight against systemic racism and injustice, a figure that grew as the company matched employee donations. Since then, however, at its various businesses, it has racked up allegations of systemic bias against people of color, including retaliating against employees who wore Black Lives Matter paraphernalia, paying low wages to a disproportionately Black and Latino warehouse workforce and discriminating against them when it comes to promotions.

During this years proxy season, Amazon shareholders considered a proposal asking the board for an independent audit to assess the companys equity policies. Although the proposal had backing at the May 26 shareholder meeting, it was voted down.

On the other hand, Starbucks, with social justice initiatives that stem from a much-publicized 2018 in-store racial profiling incident, recently released an independently produced report on its progress on civil rights concerns. The report includes metrics on racial/gender pay equity and its workforce demographics, as well as strategies for reassessing policies previously put in place and updates on how they are tracking to their long-range diversity goals.

Additionally, in April, BlackRock, the worlds largest asset management firm, announced that it too would get an independent audit of its racial equity and inclusion. This puts pressure on smaller firms to do the same.

A companys dedication to the timely disclosure of complete equity data is the only way the public can assess whether its activism is performative or a real attempt at change. According to As You Sow, a shareholder advocacy organization, approximately two-thirds of companies in the S&P 500 made statements in support of racial justice in 2020, but tracking their progress toward goals they set was hampered because of a serious lack of data and transparency at the companies.

The tragedy of such lost accountability is best illustrated by Harvard University English professor and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr., looking back at the 40 acres and a mule promise to newly freed slaves the first systemic attempt to mitigate racism: Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth.

In 100 years, no one should have to imagine what might have been if the promises of equity and inclusion in 2020 were kept. Companies can be kept honest. Customers and consumers can demand that businesses promote the outcomes of their diversity programs, their process and even their struggles in the same way they promoted their aspirations a year ago.

The pledges made by American business last summer need not become the thoughts and prayers of the racial justice movement. Too much is at stake.

Ralinda Harvey Smith is a marketing and business strategy consultant and a freelance writer in Santa Monica. @ralinda

Read more:
Op-Ed: U.S. businesses pledged to support BLM. How have they done? - Los Angeles Times

Tech companies lag behind their Black Lives Matter pledges – MIT Sloan News

open share links close share links

A new report from diversity analytics company Blendoor reveals tech companies pledges of support for Black Lives Matter only went so far.

The State of DEI in Tech 2021 spotlights the diversity, equity, and inclusion disparities in 240 of the worlds largest and well-known tech companies. It comes a year after George Floyds murder. The death of the Minneapolis Black man at the hands of police reverberated around the world and prompted a wave of declarations and promises by organizations to make Black Lives Matter a part of their mission, and promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in all facets of their work.

Blendoor counted 535 pledges worth $4.56 billion made by a majority of those tech companies between January 1 and December 31, 2020. But the report also reveals, for example, that the tech companies that made Black Lives Matter pledges or statements have 20% fewer Black employees on average than companies that did not make similar pledges and statements.

Despite these public displays of commitment to DEI and the investment of billions of dollars over the last seven years there is little evidence of tangible progress overall, said Blendoor founder and CEO Stephanie Lampkin, MBA 13.

The report also spotlights that there are no Black females who are named executive officers (usually the five highest paid executives at a publicly traded company) in the 240 tech companies analyzed. Women only make up 15% of those named executive officers and on average make 21% less money than male named executive officers. And there are 49% fewer Asian executives compared to Asian workers at entry-level positions, the largest drop-off in the tech pipeline according to the report.

Lampkin started Blendoor in 2015 and in 2020 launched its BlendScore tool. The tool analyzes companies using a variety of information like public data sets as well as company websites, annual reports, diversity reports, and equity and inclusion performances. Blendscore was used to compile the State of DEI report using data from January 1, 2020 through March 31, 2021. A companys score is based on four criteria: leadership, retention, recruiting, and impact.

Heres a closer look at some of the reports findings.

According to the report, 42% of tech company executives analyzed are women or people of color, but white women represent about half of that group. White men represent about 58% of tech executives, while Asian (South, East, and Southeast) men make up 12% of tech executives. Asian women hold less than 4% of those roles, while Black men and women, and Latino and Indigenous men and women, make up less than 5% total.

Of 240 tech companies analyzed, zero had a Black female as a named executive officer. NEOs are the five highest-paid jobs in publicly traded companies.

The average salary for a white employee at one of the 240 tech companies scored is $130,000, compared to $98,000 for Latino and Indigenous employees;Black employees make an average of $91,000.

Companies founded after 2008 had an average of 32% more Asian executives than older companies. Larger companies with more than 10,000 employees had on average 56% more women executives than smaller companies. Companies headquartered in the Midwest have an average of 50% more underrepresented minorities than companies in other parts of the U.S. Underrepresented minorities are defined in the report as any individual in the U.S. in the tech industry who does not identify as white or Asian.

According to the report, Asian women in the tech companies studied have the lowest upward mobility from entry-level to executive/senior-level, with 58% fewer Asian women in executive positions compared to the number of Asian women in entry-level roles (called a drop-off rate). Asian men have a drop-off rate of 44%. Underrepresented women experience a drop-off rate of 25%, while underrepresented men experience a drop-off rate of 50%.

White women and white men did not experience a drop-off rate. Both are better represented in executive/senior-level roles than they are in entry-level roles.

Impact refers to a companys established programs and partnerships aimed at corporate social responsibility.

Annual diversity reporting is the most common impact practice among the 240 tech companies analyzed, with nearly half of the companies analyzed doing some sort of reporting; followed by supplier diversity that emphasizes relationships with women, people of color, veterans, and people with disabilities; and diversity scholarships.

Lampkin said the report does offer signs of improvement, like growth in female employees and Asian employees at every level of tech in the past six years, as well as more companies sharing their data, hiring diversity consultants, forming employee resource groups, and conducting unconscious bias training.

The companies who are making pledges are also saying we need to do better, Lampkin said. What were trying to elucidate is just saying were working on it is insufficient. If indeed you want to do better, show us your numbers on a regular basis much like you do with quarterly financial reporting.

If indeed you want to do better, show us your numbers on a regular basis much like you do with quarterly financial reporting.

The absence of Black female named executive officers and the 20% fewer Black employees figures are two things that stood out to MIT Sloan lecturerMalia Lazu.But she said she wasnt surprised at the reports overall findings or what might appear to be a lack of progress from the 240 tech companies.

This isnt about getting an anti-racism widget to market, said Lazu, a former Berkshire Bank executive vice president who focuses on inclusion in the innovation economy. Its important to understand that what youre changing here is value structures, and that doesnt happen quickly.

Building and maintaining a diverse and inclusive company is a process of continual accountability, Lazu said, but she offered some short-term steps for managers. They include individual education listening to podcasts and reading books to better understand the history of diversity, equity, inclusion, and corporate accountability and looking at the numbers, to see who exactly makes up their workforce.

Blendoor offered several calls to action for companies, including the adoption of reporting standards, and incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion standard metrics into their due diligence or when they are raising funds. Blendoor is also pushing for public disclosure of EEO-1 forms, which provide demographic breakdowns of a companys workforce by race and gender.

2021 is ushering in a new generation of environmental and socially consciously investors, consumers, and job seekers, Lampkin said. Companies who take an apathetic or apolitical stance on social issues will find it difficult to attract and retain the best talent.

View post:
Tech companies lag behind their Black Lives Matter pledges - MIT Sloan News