Share of Black Employees at JPMorgan Falls for Sixth Straight Year in U.S.

Jamie Dimon told JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s shareholders in an April 2016 letter that the biggest U.S. bank would “dramatically step up our effort” to hire black people. A year later, he said the firm was making progress and would keep it up, and this April he said the results of some efforts were encouraging.

But numbers released on the bank’s website this week show lost ground. In 2017, black employees comprised a dwindling share of the company’s U.S. workforce for a sixth straight year, declining to 13.4 percent from 16 percent in 2011. Diversity at other big banks is sliding, too: Black workers now make up about one in 10 U.S. Citigroup Inc. employees from about one in six in 2009.