Diversity Programs Fall Short Attempts To Eliminate Racism Yield Mixed Results
After consultant Robert Hayles made a recent presentation to a Midwest corporation, an audience member approached him. “You’re pretty smart for a black person,” the participant said.
Hayles was speaking about diversity in the work force.
From the degrading comments Hayles says he routinely hears to a “glass ceiling” keeping minorities below management, blacks and other minorities face daily debasement in the workplace - even as their numbers in companies grow.
To many in corporate America, the debacle at Texaco Inc. comes as no surprise.
“Racism is alive and well in society; why should corporate America be any different?” asks Jacquelyn B. Gates, vice president of the Office of Ethics and Business Conduct at Nynex Corp., the regional telephone company.
Texaco’s chairman and chief executive, Peter I. Bijur, says the bigotry at his company represents just the “tip of the iceberg” of corporate prejudice nationwide.
An estimated 70 percent of the largest 1,000 corporations now have programs to help diversify the work force and enable different employees to work well together.
Yet most diversity work consists of training sessions that last a day, hardly enough time to change many minds, much less the corporate culture. And management often acts to satisfy laws, rather than out of a true belief in a diverse work force.
“There is a lot of lip service,” says Sondra Thiederman, a San Diego-based consultant who has been working on such issues for 15 years. She said that corporations often seem open to diversity at meetings.
“Then you encounter these people over dinner and a drink and their attitude begins to slip,” she says. “The jokes come out.”
She sees a backlash against diversity across society due to downsizing and the tough economic times of a few years ago. “People feel their jobs were taken away from them,” she says.
In recent years, attacks have mounted on welfare, immigration and affirmative action. This month, California voters overwhelmingly approved a ban on affirmative action programs in public hiring, contracting and college enrollments.
Yet companies have grown more diverse. Groups other than white males in the work force have increased 63 percent during the last decade due to affirmative action and demographics, says the Society of Human Resource Management.
Still, white men accounted for 90 percent of the senior ranks of all occupations last year, even though they made up 41 percent of the entire work force, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. By 2005, white men will have even less of a role in the workplace, representing just 38 percent of the nation’s workers, the government agency estimates.
Most racism at companies isn’t as stark as revealed at Texaco, where a secret tape recording of executives belittling blacks led to a $176 million race-discrimination settlement, the biggest on record.
Instead, discrimination is often subtle. Hayles, for example, was once paid less than a white predecessor for doing the same job.
Patricia Digh of the Society for Human Resource Management says whites may not even know they have prejudices. “I may not have told a racist joke, but I may have laughed at some,” she says. “Racism is not always an overt act.”
That in part explains why diversity programs, although widespread, often don’t work.
While prejudices are deep-rooted, most diversity programs consist of a short sensitivity training seminar.
At Texaco, top executives last year attended a two-day diversity “learning experience” that was also given to managers. The White Plains, N.Y.-based company has also given managers equal opportunity and sexual harassment seminars.
Under the settlement, the company will pay $35 million to set up a court-monitored task force that will create companywide diversity, mentoring and ombudsman programs.
The company will also change its employee appraisal system and post more jobs nationwide to help break down the glass ceiling for minorities.
Graphic: Corporate complaints