racial equality

NCRW Panel on Corporate and Academic Diversity – Post#2

Moderator Ana Duarte McCarthy (pictured) leads the next bit of the session by noting that less than 3% of senior management and corporate officers are people of color. The numbers for women are extremely low. What is it that isn’t working? And what can we do about it?

Melinda Wolfe responds: “Until organizations recognize that women bear children and are primarily the caretakers for them, there will continue to be barriers for women to move up. Some women might come off the track; there are times when women take the scenic route but want to get back on and make a difference, but our systems don’t allow that. There are still huge underlying unconscious bias factors that go on in these institutions, that without critical mass, will continue. In some ways we’re at a dangerous inflection point, in that there are now more people who’ve heard about diversity and think that they get it. But they don’t. Because they think that they get it, their behaviors are more insidious.”

Anne Erni responds: “Several years ago, several of us worked with Sylvia Ann Hewlett on her Brain Drain study. We found that nearly 43% of women in corporations want to step off the track for a while, and 93% of them want to get back on. But less than half are successful in finding fulfilling fulltime roles. So some firms created models, like Lehman’s Encore program, to address. It’s been successful. The key is getting men to empathize. Many of these guys marry women on the Street [Wall Street, that is – GWP], so they are more likely to get it. There were also incentives: people would get paid for referring women who wanted to on-ramp.”

Ah, how money talks. Poignant conversation about race going on next. A woman from the audience comments that she’s often the only African American student in the room. How do we move past that? Rosemary Cocetti shares a personal story about her son, who is an athlete, and a great writer, and who experienced straight out racism at college. His professor didn’t believe that a paper he submitted was his. Ironic, given that Cocetti is the diversity officer on campus. Actually, less ironic, more telling of how far we have to go. On the corporate front, how do coworkers deal with it the first time they see a colleague wearing a head scarf? The dilemma of being the first.

Stomachs are rumbling and the panel is wrapping up. A question asked earlier by Meryl Kaynard, Lehman Brothers, who is sitting next to me, has yet to be addressed. Rats, as this was my question too. The question: What’s going on in terms of Generations X and Y? And I want to know: to what extent does the comfort with a more global community–the one in which we’ve come of professional age–shape our expectations for inclusion here at home?

Ok, signing off now. Fear of carpel tunnel kicking in!

I’m back here at the Kimmel Center at NYU, blogging the session called “Diversity and Inclusion in Corporations and Academia,” moderated by Ana Duarte McCarthy, Lehman Brothers. The panelists are talking about how they each got into diversity work at their corporation or university. Here’s how:

Subha Barry, Merrill Lynch:
“One of the best ways to see the diversity awakening is to see it happen around you. For me, it happened in my community. When I first moved to Princeton, NJ, I had to drive to Edison to go to Indian grocery stores, as there were no such stores in Princeton. And I thought, think about the amount of business we leave on the table simply because we don’t recognize the diversity around us.”

Melinda Wolfe, American Express: “Whether it’s Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Citigroup, or Merrill Lynch, the investment banking world is dog-eat-dog. It’s only been recently and through the efforts of the people around this table and others that we have been able to work cooperatively around diversity. Across firms, those of us who work in this field go around with linked arms. It’s not typically what you see among competitive firms. But we all recognize that it takes truly a village to fix this one.”

Rosemary Cocetti, Georgetown University
“I got into my position because the President of the university created it and offered it to me.”

Anne Erni, Lehman Brothers
“I was on the trading floor, one of the few women who continued to move up. Most of my friends dropped out and became SAHMs. I got a call one day—the Friday of the last week in August—and I was taken aside and told by my boss: ‘Men run in packs. Women don’t. Go create your pack.’ Eventually, I was asked to leave the floor and become Chief Diversity Officer. And I told him, yes. You got me at hello.”

Ana Duarte-McCarthy next asks the million dollar question: What Makes Diversity Efforts Work? Some responses:

Melinda Wolfe: “If you don’t have breadth, depth, and leadership, your organization’s effort at diversity is not poised for success.”

Anne Erni: “The firm set aside an 8-figure bonus pool to reward inclusion. When you’re on Wall Street, you’re entire focus during the year is on how much bonus you’re going to get. So we challenged each division to do an analysis and a plan. The head of each division then presented the outcome of their plan. Six months ago, we completed the fourth round of reviews. In the beginning, you could tell some of them had just been handed the powerpoint script and were struggling about whether to say ‘gay’ or ‘lesbian,’ ‘African American’ or ‘black’. My colleague asked one guy who was stumbling to close the book and just tell him from his heart what inclusion meant for him. The next year, he won.”

Moving now to some Q&A…

Lately I’ve heard the term “diversity fatigue” used to describe a) the genuine frustration that diversity programs at corporations haven’t made more progress, and b) the eye-rolling backlash against affirmative action.

Offering a fresher take, there’s a great post over at the NYTimes blog Shifting Careers called “Diversity at Work: More than Just Numbers” in which Marci Alboher interviews Natalie Holder-Winfield, an employment lawyer turned diversity consultant and author of Recruiting and Retaining a Diverse Workforce. The book, says Marci, is “a well-researched and eye-opening account of why minority employees flee workplaces even when employers have so-called diversity programs in place.”

Based on interviews with professionals from various backgrounds, Holder-Winfield seeks to provide managers, employees, and students with advice for navigating the overlay issues of cultural and generational diversity. The book looks great, but from a “making it pop” perspective, I kind of wish it had a catchier title. This one would be hard. I’m coming up dry. Which is probably why they went with the title they did?!

Read excerpts from the interview here.

The second class of PWV is well underway, and already I miss being a part. So yesterday I sat in–ok, lurked–on a Progressive Women’s Voices conference call with Janus Adams, the Emmy Award-winning author/historian, publisher/producer, creator of BackPax children’s media. Janus herself was one of four children selected to end de facto segregation in New York in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. These days, in addition to hosting a talk show, she writes a weekly column, her latest one titled, “25 Books that Changed African-America–Book #4.” In case you’re wondering, Book 4 is Freedom’s Journal, a newspaper launched on March 16, 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. These two launched not only a newspaper, but the history of African-American journalism as well.

I’m so struck with the footage that keeps looping over and over today, from the Lorraine Motel. And with the remembrances coming through the cables, bloglines, and wires. So many, but I wanted to share these three rather poignant ones:

Addie Stan
Reuben Jackson
Kai Wright

Many democracies–the United Kingdom, Argentina, India, Israel, the Philippines, Pakistan, Liberia, France, and Jamaica, to name a few–have or have had women heads of state, and other countries–oh, like Peru and Bolivia–have elected presidents who are members of racial minority groups. Not so much here in the US of A, which is why, of course, it is rightly Such a Friggin Huge Deal. And the scholars are rightly getting busy.

On September 26-27, 2008, the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John’s University School of Law will hold a symposium entitled Making History: Race, Gender and the Media in the 2008 Elections at their Queens campus to explore it all. They’re inviting proposals from scholars from all relevant disciplines (law, media, political science, gender studies, race studies, ethnic studies, sociology, economics, history) and activists engaged in “developing concepts, analyses, methods, or data relevant to race, gender, media and elections.” Any takers? The deadline for submissions is March 14, 2008. More info available here.

Quick–pass it on!

CNN now has a 3 minute video up from their 1-hour exploration of race, gender, and politics on Friday. In it, CNN’s Randi Kaye talks with a group of women about the “unavoidable issues of race and sex over Clinton and Obama.” And speaking of spectacle, on March 31, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at my alma mater (the University of Michigan) will be offering one of theirs. The event is called “Status and Spectacle: Stagings of Gender, Race, and Class in U.S. Popular Culture” and I wish I could teleport and attend. The poster they sent me has this amazing image of the Hollywood Canteen for Service Men, white service men casually strolling in on one side, “colored” service men rigidly lined up on the other, waiting, it seems for the white boys to go in. Among the topics to be covered: southern culture, white manhood, and the 1956 assault of Nat “King” Cole; Gretchen Wilson and the country rhetoric of the “virile female”; and clashing configurations of class, race, gender, rank, and celebrity at the Hollywood Canteen.

(The event will take place from 4-6pm at the Michigan Union, for those in the area! For more info, call 734.764.9537)

That gal Courtney has done it again. Though we don’t necessarily agree on choice of candidates, we’ve been having a great offline discussion about it all of late. And today, Courtney’s beautiful ode to her dude Obama, which is really an ode to interracial love, has been published in the New York Daily News. Read it and, with me, get misty.

And while I’m on it and feeling all Valentiney today, thought I’d share something I wrote last spring, when Marco moved in with me and bought me a mezuzah as a gift:

IMAGINE my surprise. You, a Puerto Rican from the South (let me say it) Bronx who had never attended a seder, never set foot in a synagogue, who knew Judaism as H&H bagels, Hollywood moguls, and odd looking men in black hats. You, a curious blend of cocoa bean, Cuban rhythm, good ole American diner, and deco movie palace. With you, I find myself able to share — and dig into — my Jewishness in a way I hadn’t with the earnest parade of appropriate Jewish suitors and boyfriends and yes, one highly appropriate husband, who preceded you. One marriage down, a Jewish divorce behind me, and a life of wonder ahead, I consider you, oddly, my guide….

(Love you, babe!)

Another take–or rather, takedown–on the racegenderpolitics discussion, over at HuffPo. GWP guest blogger Cathy Prendergast wrote more about the CNN website debacle Cho refers to in her post, here. (Thanks to Ann at feministing for the heads up.)

Addendum: This just in, via Cathy: Toni Morrison to Endorse Obama. As Cathy suggests, “probably her way of taking the ‘Clinton first black president’ remark.” Um, yep.

Join the National Organization for Women Foundation, National Council of Negro Women, and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research for the 2008 Summit on Economic Justice for Women, April 11-12 in Atlanta, Georgia. The summit is dedicated to “Bringing Together Research and Advocacy–from Local to Global–to Advance Economic Justice and Empowerment for Women.” To register, click here.

Goals for the conference include expanding the body of knowledge on critical economic issues; increasing our understanding of the global economic challenges women face; building and strengthening alliances in the economic justice movement; developing recommendations and strategies for enhancing women’s economic empowerment; and informing policies globally and locally, including helping to shape the 2008 U.S. presidential election debate.

It’s not too late to submit a workshop or research paper. Workshops will blend research and grassroots action, offering participants an opportunity to hear from experts and apply action strategies to address economic inequality. The deadline to submit a proposal is Feb. 15 (hey–that’s my birthday!!)

And hey, while we’re on the subject of economic justice and just economics, do check out the latest HuffPo piece from PursePundit, called “Quickfixonomics.” PursePundit suggests we check out what George Soros has to say about the current financial crisis, too. How is this all affecting women? Stay tuned. More on that very soon.