By Jeff Green, Gerald Porter Jr, Cedric Sam, and Christopher Cannon | Bloomberg | March 9, 2021
It used to be difficult to get information about the racial makeup of a company’s workforce. That’s quickly changing, at least for the largest U.S. companies, offering a revealing look at how much progress they need to make to reflect the population at all levels.
As part of an initiative to track the corporate response to the Black Lives Matter movement, Bloomberg has obtained detailed breakdowns of U.S. employee counts by race and gender across job categories for 37 out of 100 of the nation’s biggest corporations, up from 25 last fall. An additional 31 companies pledged to provide the information in the near future.
“This is a significant step forward in measuring diversity within companies,” said Alison Omens, chief strategy officer at JUST Capital, which has been pressuring companies to release such data. “Disclosure in the first step in advancing racial equity.”
