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Why Attracting and Retaining Diverse Talent is a Strategic Priority Blog, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging
To tackle longstanding workplace discrimination, many future-focused organizations are adding diversity officers to their leadership teams. Why? Because the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission didn’t solve the ethnic, racial and gender imbalances prominent in the U.S. workforce, and the issues aren’t going away on their own. For example, check out the following statistics about the dismal state of diversity in today’s workforce. American Progress reports that in nonprofits, 82% of employees are white, despite the fact that just 64% of the working-age population is non-Hispanic white. As of 2014, of the Fortune 500 CEOs, just over 4% were people of color, and only 24 (4.8%) were women. As Silvie Woolf said, fewer CEOs are named David than are women. Google reports that 3% of their employees are Hispanic and 2% are black. Apple’s employees are 70% male. LinkedIn has a global employee base that is 3% Hispanic and 1% black.