After George Floyd’s killing this year, corporate America flooded social media with statements of support for protesters—and some even went further, with pledges and targets to hire more Black people and other people of color, including in top management roles.
Now some companies are taking the ultimate step—unveiling all of their data on the racial makeup of their employees. By showing how underrepresented Black and other minority groups are in their workplaces, the companies are inviting investors, customers and workers to monitor their progress and hold them accountable to make improvements.
A Bloomberg survey of members of the S&P 100 index as of June found that 25% were willing to provide a full copy of their EEO-1 report, a document companies have to provide to the federal government but aren’t required to make public. The filing includes breakdowns by race of several tiers of a company’s workforce, from executives to service employees. And because the data is reported in raw numbers, it’s easy to see exactly how many Black executives or Hispanic middle managers a company has.
Many of the companies that shared their EEO-1 forms have only recently published them for the first time, and others had never shared them before providing them to us. Other companies gave us partial racial data, and some said they plan to release their EEO-1 for the first time in 2021. We also asked companies about their plans to improve representation of people of color in their workplaces and management ranks.
Big investors such as BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are increasing their focus on racial transparency, pressuring companies to reveal more data. Multiple advocacy groups are taking aim at board composition and calling out companies that lack diversity. And New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer said last week that 34 companies in the S&P 100 agreed to provide to him the EEO-1 form they share privately with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, by 2021 at the latest.
“It makes me hopeful, to a degree, that some of the biggest companies in the world want to put these numbers out there and have their stakeholders see them,” said Alison Omens, chief strategy officer at JUST Capital, a nonprofit that measures corporate stakeholder performance and pushes for more gender and racial transparency at companies, including the disclosure of EEO-1 forms. “This is how change happens.”
Every company with more than 100 employees is required to fill out an EEO-1, which makes it useful for comparing their employee composition with their peers or across industries.
Bloomberg plans to revisit this survey over time to monitor how responses change. Companies that have promised to provide the document later—including many on the New York City comptroller’s list—will be reflected in a future report once they’ve actually released the data. If all the promises are met, that will mean about half of the companies will disclose their EEO-1 data by the end of next year.
Some companies that didn’t provide the EEO-1 this time did give us the racial composition of their employee base on a percentage basis. Such responses show that companies are acknowledging the need to provide at least some data. Other companies said they are planning to unveil new initiatives in the coming months but weren’t prepared to share them by the end of September.
If companies don’t open themselves to scrutiny, they’ll struggle on the path to diversity, said Nicholas Pearce, a professor with Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. “A lot of organizations just want to spare themselves the embarrassment. Yet change begins with the truth. If you can’t start with truth, you cannot get to reconciliation.”
Corrects story published Oct. 6 to reflect change to Target's board.