What corporate diversity stats don’t tell you 🤔 
[2/10] Let’s assume Company X releases its #diversityandInclusion stats. These will often be in the form of two pie charts: one for race and one for gender. You can clearly see the racial and gender breakdown of the entire company. But here’s what’s missing:
[3/10] #Intersectional Diversity: Identities don’t exist in silos - for these statistics to make sense, we have to see gender and race together, not on two separate diagrams. There is no information on the percentage of women of color at Company X
[4/10] Skilled vs Semi-Skilled: It could be that Company X has a skilled and semi-skilled workforce (think headquarters vs fleet drivers). It could very well be that Company X is hiring minorities to fill its semi-skilled workforce while keeping majority of its headquarters white
[5/10] Job Function: Some job functions are stereotypically dominated by a certain race or gender. For example, we know that STEM fields are still majority male and predominantly white or Asian American. Company X might have an all-male engineering team + an all-female HR team.
[6/10] Career Level: Hiring diverse people is not enough. Companies need to ensure that diverse voices are represented at all levels of their workforce i.e. entry-level, managerial, C-Suite, etc. Company X’s diverse workforce might be stuck at entry level positions due to bias
[7/10] Promotion Rates: It is often the case that women and people of color climb the corporate ladder at a slower pace than their white counterparts due to systemic barriers. Company X’s data doesn’t tell us what percentage of promotions were awarded to #peopleofcolor or #women
[8/10] Attrition Rates: Attrition numbers are one of the key indicators of an inclusive workplace culture. If members of a certain race are being fired or quitting at an unprecedented rate, the company needs to ask themselves why. Company X completely omits this info.
[9/10] Board of Directors Make-Up: The make-up of Boards of Directors are almost always omitted from diversity stats - that’s bc over 60% of Fortune 500 seats are still being held by white men. BoDs play very important decision-making roles, thus need to be fully representative
[10/10] #NonBinary Exclusion: Just the fact that men and women are the only two genders represented on Company X’s graph is simply not enough. Self-identification reports must have a full spectrum of genders.
Next time your company releases
#diversity stats, ask for more!
Next time your company releases
#diversity stats, ask for more!
