More than a year after George Floyd’s murder, the reverberations through the nation’s biggest corporations are still being felt. They haven’t resulted in drastic improvements in representation for Black people yet, but there are clear signs that companies are paying more than lip service to the idea of lasting change.
In Bloomberg’s third survey of companies in the S&P 100 since the summer of 2020, the vast majority are now providing transparency on the racial makeup of their workforces. The companies we surveyed have added at least $3.9 billion in financial commitments to causes meant to improve conditions for Black people in the U.S., on top of the more than $8 billion pledged in the summer of 2020. Most are increasing their recruiting from historically Black colleges and universities, and a large portion have established programs to include minority-owned businesses in their supply chains.
Activists have continued to hold companies’ feet to the fire—in October, shareholders voted to demand Tesla Inc. disclose its racial representation figures, though the company hasn’t agreed to do it yet. Almost all the companies in our survey now have a chief diversity and inclusion officer, a high-level position with a mandate to usher in change. Their work is helping counter the worries from last year that the wave of sympathetic Twitter posts and donations in the aftermath of Floyd’s death would be just a blip.
But progress will ultimately be measured by results, and the fact is that corporate America still doesn’t look anything near like America itself. Black and Hispanic people are still underrepresented in the workforce and especially in management. Women are nowhere close to 50% of executive roles in most companies, though Target Corp. and Biogen Inc. are nearing that threshold.
The hope is that the measures companies are taking today will pay off in the years to come—and that transparency will allow investors and the public to hold businesses accountable. In our first survey, published in October 2020, only 25 companies gave us copies of their EEO-1 form, the government-mandated document that allows us to crunch the numbers of their racial and gender representation. This year, that number is 76—and 10 others have pledged to provide them soon.
You can browse through the list below to view the most recent EEO-1 form provided by each company. Our graphic compares the companies to the 2018 averages for their industries, though in some cases companies have given us data from as recently as 2020. That’s because the EEOC hasn’t yet computed the averages for more recent years.
Marlboro cigarette manufacturer Altria Group Inc., Oreo cookie maker Mondelez International Inc., and shipping giant FedEx Corp. are among companies that perform well against their peers and the U.S. population in employment of Black executives, though their numbers are more mixed for Hispanic and Asian senior leaders. McDonald’s Corp. is one of the few that performs well in most major racial categories and in the representation of women in its executive ranks.
Investor pressure continues to increase for companies to disclose their EEO-1 forms to the public. Shareholders at both Union Pacific Corp. and DuPont de Nemours Inc. this year approved resolutions from activists asking the companies to release the reports. Union Pacific has done so. DuPont has said it will publish the report in late October.
IBM Corp. this year supported an activist proposal that the tech company release a detailed diversity report, which it has already done, and said it will release EEO-1 data in 2022, after a business unit is separated. Home Depot Inc. also said it will release the form in 2021 after years of rejecting shareholder proposals on the issue. With 76 now supplying the EEO-1 data, the holdouts become a more and more noticeable minority.
For the third time, we surveyed businesses on a range of questions about their practices to improve representation at all levels of the company. Respondents listed a wide range of ways they’re tracking representation. ConocoPhillips was among respondents that not only track hiring but employees who are leaving—and annualized attrition rates in 2020 for people of color were better than overall numbers, the oil and gas company found.
3M Co. keeps a global index to measure progress against a goal it set in 2015 to double the pipeline of diverse talent in management to 65.2%. Last year, the figure was 43.3%, the industrial products company said.
Several companies, including Union Pacific, Microsoft Corp. and Kraft Heinz Co., said they’re tracking whether employees in underrepresented groups have a sense of “belonging” at their employers—whether they feel valued by managers and colleagues.
Companies have also stepped up support for historically Black colleges and universities, with 41 giving details in the latest survey. Comcast Corp. was among companies that cited more hiring from HBCUs as a key strategy. “We are not only engaging recent college graduates from HBCUs but employees at all levels who are HBCU alumni,” the cable company said. “Through short-term gig assignments, our current employees who are HBCU alumni, join our recruiters virtually on campus to discuss career opportunities.”
Still, there are more than 100 HBCUs in the U.S., and only about half of them were identified by name by companies discussing specific recruiting relationships. Activity remains concentrated among a handful of the biggest, best-known schools, such as North Carolina A&T State University, Howard University, Florida A&M, Spelman College, Clark Atlanta University and Prairie View A&M University.
Companies have also added to their financial commitments to non-profits and other groups to improve opportunities for underrepresented groups. After about 65 companies reported initial pledges of about $8.1 billion in the months after George Floyd was killed, more than half the companies detailed an additional $3.9 billion added this year – and disclosed spending of about $1.6 billion so far. Many of the largest promises are spread out over many years of investment.
For the first time, we asked companies if they had diversity programs for suppliers, a strategy some have used to support minority-owned businesses. More than half of the companies either detailed or promised another $74.6 billion in spending with minority suppliers. Biogen, the biotech company, said its spending with traditionally underrepresented business owners increased ninefold in 2020 from a year earlier, while Mastercard Inc. plans to raise its spending with Black suppliers by more than 70% to $100 million a year by 2025.
The EEOC is requiring companies to turn in their 2019 and 2020 EEO-1 forms by Oct. 25, though that deadline has been extended more than once. If more companies deliver on their promises to provide transparency, or listen to shareholders who want to hold them accountable, we’ll get an even clearer picture in the coming months of how companies are changing.
The Bloomberg criteria for EEO-1 disclosure remains rigid. Companies that provide less than all the available fields, or give percentages instead of raw numbers, are not counted. The preference is for the original form, which does not require the company to do extra disclosure.
For now, businesses say they’re committed to keeping alive the spirit of last summer’s awakening. “After the murder of George Floyd, we knew we had employees in pain, and this required us to listen—to really listen—to understand their experience inside and outside of Ford,” the automaker said. “We had to address bias and make sustained change.”
(Corrects General Dynamics’ response on chief diversity officer. Earlier versions of this story corrected Abbott’s response on recruiting from HBCUs and the year of companies’ pledges in the second paragraph.)